


Any Other Faith

by angularmomentum



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anachronisms, Bees, Blasphemy, M/M, Magic, an extremely loose interpretation of marriage, historical innacuracy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 14:25:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14114292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: God supposedly had a plan. Whether it was one that would ever be shared with Nicklas was irrelevant, but sometimes he really wished a bush would burst into flames and tell him what to do. That sounded very relaxing.





	Any Other Faith

**Author's Note:**

> Me: I'm writing the weirdest fic
> 
> Unhockeyed Friend: tell me 
> 
> Me: [this](http://acreaturecalledgreed.tumblr.com/post/170883364843/acreaturecalledgreed-for-the-first-like-14-years) but hockey
> 
> Unhockeyed Friend: oh... my god
> 
> -
> 
> Happy Not At All Valentine's Day! I got extremely carried away. 
> 
> This owes a huge debt of gratitude to [screamlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet), [kingsoftheimpossible](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingsoftheimpossible/pseuds/kingsoftheimpossible) and [jolach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jolach/pseuds/jolach) for encouragement, laughter and an expert series of questions. What's good is theirs and what's left is mine. Thanks guys, and to L as always. 
> 
>  
> 
> Content warnings at the end.

-  
ONE  
-

To say the ways of God were mysterious was ordinary; of course they were mysterious. What good was a God if their ways were fathomable to the human mind? Faith was not always harmonious, but that was why it was faith. God supposedly had a plan. Whether it was one that would ever be shared with Nicklas was irrelevant, but sometimes he really wished a bush would burst into flames and tell him what to do. That sounded very relaxing.

“Slow down,” he told Andre, the apprentice stonecutter who, on ordinary days, could usually be found artfully streaked with stone dust and watching the goings-on on the forum, about a mile from where his ostensible employment was. Andre had once brought Nicklas a very beautiful stone beehive, miniature in proportion, and been sorely disappointed when Nicklas had not kissed him. Nicklas would not have in any case but that was not the issue of the moment. “You need to marry who?”

“I don’t know! Anyone!” Andre threw his hands above his head as though calling to the divine. “You, even!”

“You can’t marry until you’ve completed your apprenticeship,” Nicklas told him, internally dismissing his concern after a moment of hesitation as the madness of the young, and possibly the hysteria of someone who perhaps inhaled more stone dust than air on occasion. “There will be time.” It did not bear repeating that though he was a priest without a church, God frowned on the occasional desires of his flesh regardless, and did not relinquish gifts once given. Andre fell to his knees in the grass outside Nicklas’ small home, unfortunately agitating the small swarm of bees which had begun to drift to rest, setting them to angry buzzing. Nicklas soothed them quickly, letting them rest across his shoulders.

“Not if I go to war there won't,” Andre said miserably, clutching at the hem of Nicklas’ robe. “Because I’ll be _dead!_ ”

“If you go to— what?”

Andre looked up from where he was wiping his eyes on Nicklas’ clothes, nose scrunched in disbelief. “You really need to get out more,” Andre said. “Doesn’t God tell you stuff?”

“God has never told me anything,” Nicklas informed him, taking a strategic step back. “What’s this about a war?”

-

There was a crowd. Nicklas abhorred a crowd, and crowds abhorred Nicklas. The two went together like milk and thistle, or like bees and people afraid of bees, which in Nicklas’ experience was most of them.

He still had to politely shoulder his way to the town forum, such was the volume of people. One or two yelped when they saw him, though Andre tailed him happily, speaking of course. Nicklas had long since tuned him out.

The notices were not numerous. It was spring and the rains were coming and going, leaving all things damp and curling in the sun. He had never seen more than a handful of folk reading the small selection of dicta attached carefully to the board, as those who could read were not usually congregated at once. Now, though, it seemed the whole town was there to see for themselves.

The praetor herself was very likely to be at home with her family instead of trying to be heard over the din, leaving Nicklas to read for himself. “All unmarried men are to be drafted? By what hand?”

“The Emperor's,” said the woman to his left, standing past the length of his arms and eyeing the bees nervously. “That will include you, father?”

“The hell it will,” Nicklas declared, to a mass of indrawn breath. “Andre,” he said, loud enough for at least enough people to spread a rumour. “I have a task for you.” Nicklas had always favoured spring weddings.

-

Perhaps, in hindsight, Nicklas could have been more prudent.

His masters at the monastery had often had cause for despair with him, not least because even as a novice he could not be kept indoors lest a swarm follow him in, and his moods were such that even when separated from his creatures they seemed to find cause to mirror his agitation. Perhaps different orders might have taken him as a creature of the devil, though it was just as well none had tried to burn the evil from him. Nicklas suspected the reprisal on the part of the bees might have been unfortunate.

It came as something of a shock that twenty young men had arrived in his clearing overnight, bedding down as close to the tree line as possible to keep the greatest distance from the hives.

“Fuck,” Nicklas muttered, not yet awake enough at the crack of dawn to deal with this. He picked Andre out of the tangle, stepping over sleeping bodies and those just beginning to wake. He grabbed him by the arm while he was still mumbling “wha—?” At Nicklas’ looming shape and dragged him inside.

“You said anyone who wanted to get married,” Andre said, once Nicklas had slammed the door behind them more for form’s sake than privacy; he had no shutters in his windows. “They want to get married!”

“To _whom_?” Nicklas hissed. “Each other?”

Andre blinked at him.

“I suppose I wasn’t as specific as I could have been,” Nicklas allowed, after a moment of incredible disbelief. He looked around his house, what there was of it: four walls and a doorway. A bed against the furthest stones and a large fireplace, big enough that Nicklas lasted the winter even with the windows open to creatures seeking shelter. Herbs dried in the rafters. A table, and his growing collection of stone jars. “They won’t all fit,” he said, “so you’ll have to work something out. Let’s get this over with.”

“What— now?”

“When is the legion arriving?”

“I don’t know!”

“Then it may as well be now.” Nicklas refrained from calling him a dolt. He was only as he’d been made. 

Having now lived outside of town for several years, Nicklas could no longer claim to be wholly disconnected from its goings-on, but even so, there were faces he didn’t recognize. He supposed he’d get there, if they were to be his husbands. He stepped outside, shuttling Andre back into the group so that he could address them all at once. “I see you’ve all come to be married, so let’s get it over with.” He held out his right hand. “Do you all take me to be your husband?” The susurrus of furtive whispers began just as he expected it to. He cleared his throat. “Today, please. I have work to do.”

“Is that how it works?” Nicklas did recognize this one. It was Tom, obviously shirking his duty at the mill. “We just all marry you?”

“God works in mysterious ways,” Nicklas intoned. “Now say “I do” so I can get on with my day.”

“What if we want a divorce later?” Nicklas identified Michael, clinging unsubtly to Tom’s side. These were by no means the labours of Hercules, but Nicklas already felt tired.

“Do you want to go to war tomorrow?” Nicklas asked them, urging himself to be gentle. A mass of lowered eyes told him no. “Do you take me?”

The vows came staggered, agreement in the round, but Nicklas was confident they had all said the words, binding them before man and God. Good enough. The bees hummed contentedly around him, settling in his hair and across his still outstretched hand. “I now pronounce us married,” he said. “Some of you will need to tell me your names.”

-

Nicklas, when he used to dream, often had dreams of honey.

He had not had a dream in quite some time, or in any case not the kind one remembered in the morning. His sleep was deep and regular, and he had not awoken with the taste of sweetness on his tongue in many years.

The morning after his wedding he woke with a strange feeling of memory, as though hearing a voice he had thought forgotten.

Then, of course, the sleep cleared from his eyes and he emerged into the morning light to find a fair amount of industry, which was disturbing the bees, and all thoughts of pleasant dreams vanished. Clearly he would need to take a firmer stance on widening the clearing.

Several of his new spouses had taken their shirts off and Andre was unhelpfully staring from where he was perched on Nicke’s low garden wall, occasionally calling useless pointers to Michael and his cohort of woodsmen who were destroying the careful harmony of his surroundings.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Nicklas asked to group at large.

Michael dropped his axe in alarm. “Are you supposed to say that?”

“Are you supposed to cut trees without asking?” There was a moment of pregnant silence, during which Nicklas became aware that while he himself felt he was doing reasonable work in keeping himself calm, the hives behind his house had begun to set to a truly ominous buzz. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Nicklas knew not when or why the bees had decided he was theirs and they were his; it was beyond the reach of his memory. However, he well remembered them first coming to his defence and the regret, though small, had never quite left him. Let those who were themselves sinless be the first to name the sin of others, he reminded himself, bitterly. “Cut a path away, there,” he said, gesturing slightly north. “Half a mile. Make yourselves a clearing, and use the timber and stones for a house. This one belongs to the bees.”

Michael boggled at him. “Doesn’t it belong to you?”

“Those who belong to the Church are but a part of it,” Nicklas said archly.

Andre laughed. Nobody else did.

Nicklas stood there until they began to realise he wouldn’t be moved.

“Right, well, I’ll just-” Michael began to back away. “I’ll go- Tom has- bye.”

Soon enough the only sound left was Andre chuckling and the low rumble of the still-unsettled hives.

“Do you try to be scary, or does it just happen?” Andre asked, plucking a sprig of Silphium and placing it between his teeth.

“I’d stop chewing that if you still harbour thoughts of breeding,” Nicklas said, bending to begin weeding, dismissing him from his attention. It was a kind sort of day, when the sun was bright and clear but had not yet come down close enough to the land for it to burn. In the high summer the grass turned russet gold and everything sat heavy and still, waiting for the first breath of cool air. Today the plants were green and budding, and Nicklas had plenty of work to do to gently urge the climbing nettles away from his other herbs.

Andre watched him for a while, kicking his heels against the stones. “I could fix this, if you want.”

“Are you a mason?”

“Not yet, but—”

“Help your friends,” Nicklas counselled him gently. “The wall will hold. Go build another, and find yourself a bed.”

“I have a bed at Marcus’ house.”

“And when the legion arrives and asks why you have not left it for a marital home?”

Andre sighed. “Why can’t I stay with you? Aren’t you my husband?”

A sharp pain made itself known in Nicklas’ chest, the kind that never came from exertion but usually only arrived in the strange hours of the night between sleeps, when all was dark and still and Nicklas felt very far from holy. “In marriage you vowed to love and obey me.”

“You’re a really terrible priest,” Andre informed him, but he did go, leaving Nicklas to his very private agreement.

Nicklas had never deviated from his vows of celibacy, and had never previously given thought to marriage, though some of his order had taken each other as spouses. The vows of marriage were secondary, for them, those who had promised themselves to God. Nicklas had never thought it to be anything but some strange kind of pageant to take one but not the other, to pledge devotion in the shadow of something else. It didn’t matter so much, now. The deed had been done, and whatever Nicklas thought of marriage was between himself and his heart, as ever. If he could do this and consider it a good deed, that was enough. He did not have to linger on the ache in the pit of his stomach which almost a memory, a kind of bruise left by what might have been, not what was.

A bee settled nearby, visiting the budding lavender, and then another. Soon enough they were all around, a soft hum of company, and Nicke bent himself to his work in earnest.

There was no hint of storm in the air, nor breath of thunder, but Nicklas felt it nonetheless, a restlessness beneath him. _You could speak to me any time_ he thought, in place of a prayer.

-  
TWO  
-

“There are no unmarried men in town, Praefectus.”

“None?”

“So we were told.”

“You checked?”

“How?”

Sasha rubbed gently at his temples. “tribune, checking maybe means you ask around?” Gods save him from Equestrians trying for promotion. “Who tell you there are no men for drafting?”

His least intelligent tribune was a nice boy, at least. He had the grace to blush up into his lightly-bearded cheeks. “The baker.”

Who he had undoubtedly visited for sweets as soon as he got within the town limits. Sasha himself was wholly uncertain how necessary it was to gather troops for a war with what amounted to no more than an upstart tribe on a bleak and fractious island, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have to take his duties seriously. One did not rise within the ranks by voicing one’s private opinions. “We need at least a hundred from this region,” he said, with what he felt was great patience. “This is not so small a town. So?”

“So there must be some?”

Sasha drew in a long breath, held it, and let it out. “No, tribune. Where have they _gone_?” The tribune stared at him. Clearly, Sasha was going to have to do what he usually ended up doing: fixing the problem himself. “Send me your centurion,” he said, gripping the edges of his field desk only a fraction too hard, which he considered great restraint. “See to your horses.”

The tribune saluted and left, his relief visible across the slump of his shoulders. It was too early in the morning to drink, so Sasha busied himself with sorting his maps, a useless and soothing exercise as they were all in order already. As usual when Sasha didn’t want company his aide arrived uninvited, slipping beneath the pinned-back canvas of his tent with a very large pastry in one hand and a stack of messages in the other.

He threw them across Sasha’s desk. “Mail,” he said, sitting down in Sasha’s only unfolded chair, which happened to be behind him.

“Good morning, Kuzya,” Sasha said, relieved of all duties to both dignity and Latin. He turned around to steal a bite of breakfast before he handed it back, now sporting a large bite-mark with a tooth missing. “What fresh hell have you brought me?”

“I’ll never stop being amazed how many people think an accent means you don’t understand anything they’re saying.” Kuznetsov waggled both his ginger eyebrows in what Sasha presumed was delight. “Have you ever heard of a mass wedding? Some of those one-god nutjobs were talking about “the marriage” like there was only one.”

Sasha thought about his next words very carefully, refusing to betray the bubbling unease growing within him. “One-god nutjobs? Are there priests?”

“Maybe. I didn’t stay long. Seems like the kind of place where everyone knows each other. Only so long I can pretend to be with a merchant before they ask where the merchant is.”

“Why not pretend to be a merchant?”

“And have people ask to see my wares?”He gestured at himself, grinning. “I’m too old.”

“I free you and this is the thanks I get,” Sasha grumbled, reaching for the last bite of the pastry, which Kuzya handed over with only slight reluctance. “Bad jokes and worse information.”

“There was one thing I thought was odd,” Kuzya said, tipping the chair back on its hind legs before Sasha counterbalanced it with his foot, keeping him from ending up in a heap on the hard-packed floor. “What’s a normal amount of bees, would you say?”

Sasha swallowed thickly, taste coming back to him all at once, lingering beneath the crust of their shared breakfast, seeped into his memory, thick and sweet. “What kind of a question is that?”

“The place is crawling with them,” Kuzya went on, perhaps deciding to pretend ignorance of the sudden rasp in Sasha’s voice. “No wonder all their pastries are so good, I guess.”

Sasha was prevented from replying by the arrival of the centurion. As Sasha composed himself for command Kuzya slipped away, as was his habit when faced with any officer that wasn’t Sasha. He supposed old habits died hard, and turned to ask what could be done if indeed there were no men to draft here. The question of bees did not quite slip his mind, but lingered only as a buzz, a phantom sound he had probably conjured for himself but could not seem to banish.

-

Sasha, born neither in Rome nor of it, had done very well in its long shadow. It did not mean he agreed with the principles of empire, simply that of the options open to him the path of least resistance and most toil had yielded the greatest dividends. Only free men served the legions and he had been one of those for a very long time; he considered it well-earned.

Time had a way of blurring memory, stretching it like leather on a tanning rack, shrinking in places and becoming supple with use in others.

Sasha had been a young man once, and remembered a time before the ways and words of the south came easily to him. It was not the greater part of his life, but would always be first, the building block for all that came after.

The camp was set and his men in order. They would not be moving on for almost a week, according to their marching orders. It was just Sasha who couldn’t sleep, lying awake in the cool darkness running his fingers back and forth across his lips, searching for a lost word, a dead flavour.

“I can hear you thinking,” Kuzya muttered from across the tent, tossing a bundled cloak at him. “You’re a mouth breather and somehow I’ve gotten used to your snoring, so you’ll understand why I’m vexed by its absence.”

“What do you know about them? The priests?”

“People always want to believe something bigger than them gives a shit what they do,” Kuzya answered, after a moment. “Personally I like the idea that existence is random, it makes me feel better about the captured-in-battle thing.”

“Fetch me my clothes if you won’t answer my question.”

“Maybe you ask bad questions,” Kuzya grumbled, but he got up anyway to help Sasha dress. “Where shall I say you’ve gone?”

“I’ll be back soon.”

“The brothel, then,” Kuzya concluded. “I’ll presume there is one.”

“They’ll wonder what I keep you for.”

“My dazzling wit,” Kuzya said. “Anyway you don’t keep me, you pay me to stay.”

Sasha really did wonder why sometimes, though perhaps that was as much a function of his own uncertainty than anything Kuznetsov had given him reason to question. He’d taken a Roman name and a paid position and Sasha’s thoroughly ignoble origins aside would not have done badly with his sponsorship. “I’m going to find out about this marriage,” he admitted. “Maybe the gods will guide me, then you’ll feel a fool.”

“And if you find a tavern and some willing arms you can say it was a powerful omen.”

“I’ll have become a good Roman at last,” Sasha said, taking his cloak. “Don’t wait up.”

-

The ride to town was short enough, though Sasha had learned from his predecessor never to garrison close enough to a town for the men to slip away in the night and wreak havoc in the taverns. The horse made quick work of the distance, but as with walking Sasha found himself too lulled by the familiar movements and left with too much time to brood on what he might find, which was precisely the opposite of a useful state of mind.

He found his way through what passed for the town gates, an edifice barely deserving of the name, and passed into the silent streets.

It was a peaceful little place, stone-work all in shades of warm sand evident even in the darkness and cart-tracks kept well clear of offal.

The noise of his horse’s hooves on the stones drew a stir of attention, almost imperceptible movements behind windows and in alleys.

Looking for something felt like too strong an intention for what he was doing; it was almost better to think of it as a kind of open inquiry, his mind allowed to engage in the productive act of loose thinking. Something would jump out if he was ready for it.

Riding through town towards its far reaches, Sasha had no urge to stop, so he didn’t. The boundary line of dwellings was barely enclosed, an unmanned gate at the far end standing closed but only barred by one lone plank. He moved it aside and let himself out, leading his horse through.

Dawn was far off still, but when Sasha turned to face the forest which provided the real boundary of the town, something in his chest expanded, air filling his lungs heavy in an instant.

A bee was hovering at the edge of a path. In the dead of night.

His horse shifted uneasily, reins slick in Sasha’s hand from the fierceness if his grip. Sasha uncurled his fingers. There was no reason for this tension, but something about it felt wrong; the blackness of the path cut into the trees, branches meeting too low overhead for a mounted rider to pass, the stillness of everything, save for the gentle, almost inaudible sound of the nocturnal bee. All of it was too strange.

He left the horse tethered to a tree nearest to the gate. He hoped he wouldn’t be so long that he would have to seek him out again from the clutches of horse thieves but the imperial markings on his tack should be deterrent enough until morning.

In truth, setting off on foot into the forest felt far less idiotic than it actually was, until he became aware of a buzzing, a distinct and half-forgotten sound, rising all around him. “Definitely not a normal amount of bees,” he murmured, listening for them, following the sound.

Maybe if there had been a moon Sasha would have seen it sooner, but it was dark enough that he found himself surprised by the small house at the edge of the clearing, mismatched stone wall barely ringing a neatly planted garden. It was the hives he had been looking at, a whole row of them, pointed tops cutting distinct shapes in the bare light of the stars. The hives and the figure standing in front of them, only a pale smudge of skin and robes, covered to the elbows, alive with bees.

Sasha found himself speechless but even if he had been able to speak, the sound of the clearing would have robbed him of voice. The hives thrummed at a frequency he almost felt he shouldn’t be able to hear, a thing alive in its dissonance.

The figure shook his arms, sending the swarm off, and the pale, unmarked turn of his slender wrists and soft, long hands was so familiar Sasha wondered for a moment whether he had fallen off his horse and cracked his head on a rock, and this was the feverish dream of a man bleeding slowly between realities.

Nicklas turned, and it was him, all the strange geometry of his body grown now but unmistakable in its movements. Sasha would have known him anywhere, even without the constant company of his creatures. He would have known him even without the small, fierce set of his mouth, visible as Sasha crept closer. “Your hair got long,” Sasha said, inanely. A bee settled on his outstretched hand, lifted without his conscious effort, small, furred body soft against his knuckles. “You causing trouble?”

Nicklas glared at him, bees busying themselves in his nest of hair, in the collar of his tunic, across his shoulders. There had always been something distressing about him, but long ago when they were boys Sasha hadn’t felt it like this, the jarring force of him as a physical presence instead of a complicated memory. “I’m a servant of God,” Nicklas said, archly. “I’ve caused nothing.”

“You’re a servant?” Sasha repeated, tongue-tied still by the dissonance of it, seeing him again. “Since when?”

“Are we doing this again?”

“You say you can’t leave the monastery, but here you are.”

Nicklas looked him up and down, eyes catching on Sasha’s hands, the few bees that had ventured over still calmly whispering over his skin with their tiny prickled legs. “You’re with the legion.”

It was very much not a question. Sasha’s pride in his accomplishments, his pleasure of hard work, even his hard-won scars seemed diminished. “We march for the North, collect men on the way.”

Nicklas grinned at him, teeth small and sharp behind his lips. “You’ll have to look somewhere else,” he said, “I’ve married them.”

“All of them?”

“Every single one,” Nicklas confirmed, still smiling his unsettling smile. “In the eyes of God.”

“You don’t even believe in God,” Sasha said quietly, remembering him without fifteen years of age on his still smooth, round face, a pang in his chest for the boys they’d been, both of them in different ways prisoners of Rome.

Nicklas considered him, and that was the same, the sensation of being pinned in place until Nicklas was finished looking. Sasha had thought he didn’t even know he did it, pushed some volatile force from his body as though it emanated from his eyes, but now it felt deliberate. How terrible, for Nicklas to have learned himself better without Sasha there to watch him.

“You’ll find none for your war here, Praefectus,” Nicklas said. “Unless you wish to cross the Church.”

Sasha tasted something strange in the air; the crackle left by lightning striking too close, or simply the sadness of it, what Nicklas had left unspoken between them. “You took the vows.”

Nicklas’ smile was back, crooked and terrible. “In my own way, I suppose.”

Something brittle inside Sasha cracked, ancient bone fissuring into shards. He had not until that moment realised how deeply he had hoped to touch him again until he knew he was forbidden.

“Nicky, what have you done?”

“You can afford to spare twenty men.”

“Is not my decision.”

The small collection of bees which had been visiting him took their leave, lifting off his skin all at once, going to rejoin their swarm. Sasha was surely imagining the cold, but bodies were strange. Sometimes a dream was a real thing, and the marks left by sleep persisted into morning. “You should go,” Nicklas told him.

He was right, but Sasha suspected both of them knew he’d have to come back.

-

Kuzya was not asleep when Sasha returned.

It was still an hour before dawn but he was sitting cross-legged on his bedroll with a bowl of wine at his elbow, ostensibly mending something, but by the absent movement of his hands Sasha suspected he’d only recently decided to busy himself with anything manual.

“Anything good in the mail?” Sasha asked, claiming the bowl for himself and shoving Kuzya over to make himself some room next to him.

Kuzya shrugged. “Marching orders haven’t changed. The Legatus is still illiterate, I swear his scribe spends half her time trying to make him sound less prosaic just for fun. So tell me about this ghost you’ve seen. You’re whiter than—”

“Don’t.”

“No willing arms for the night, then.” He set his mending aside, leaning his chin on his hand and watching intently as Sasha took a deep drink of the watered wine.

“I need you to do something for me,” Sasha said, after a moment of thought.

“Do I get overtime?”

“It’s a favour.”

“So yes,” Kuzya said, taking the wine back. “Was I right? There’s something really fucking weird going on here?”

“That’s one way to say it,” Sasha mused, trying to force the night into some shape that would allow him to speak of it, to contain the better part of it in words and narrative instead of an overwhelming pressure in his chest, building its way up behind his eyes. “Do you ever get the feeling the gods are fucking with you?”

“Are they supposed to do anything else? Honestly Sasha, you should listen to the orators sometimes, it’s a great way to work on your Latin.”

Sasha shoved him over, rescuing the last of the wine before it spilled. “Count yourself lucky I’m not a devotee of Disciplina.”

“You might be more fun in bed if you were,” Kuzya said, sprawled against the blankets, before the mirth dropped off his face, revealing the frighteningly observant core of him Sasha occasionally feared. “So what’s the favour?”

“There’s a priest. He lives behind the town. I need you to go watch him. He’ll know you’re there, so there’s not really any point in hiding. Just tell me what he’s doing.”

Kuzya nodded thoughtfully, arranging himself with his hands behind his head. “Anything else I should know?”

“Whatever you do, don’t fuck with the bees.”

-  
THREE  
-

The Roman caused no shortage of distress with his arrival, but at least this time Nicklas was ready for him.

He was ready for the wrong one, but the difference, he reminded himself, was semantic at best.

Whatever Sasha had been when they were young he was a Roman now, as was this tall, slender manifestation of his influence, arriving on foot in plain clothes. “Who’s the priest?” he asked, dropping a pack off his shoulder.

“Are you blind?” Andre asked from where he was uselessly but earnestly trying to pay attention to Nicklas’ explanation of his herb garden. He pointed at Nicklas, finger extended almost as accusation. “Who else would the priest be?”

“I don’t know,” said the new stranger, speech touched by the same accent as Sasha’s, cadence of it hitting Nicklas like a blow. “I’m just working here, give me slack.”

“Go away,” Nicklas tried, straightening from his crouch.

“No can do,” their visitor said, shrugging expansively, movement somehow taking up his whole body. His grin, equally, seemed to occupy most of his face. “You know what they do in the legion if you’re not follow orders? I don’t like it, so maybe we all agree we play nice.”

Nicklas jerked his chin at Andre. “You’re no more a legionary than he is.”

“True, true. But Sasha send me so maybe is almost like I am. I’m Zhenya.”

“Zenya?” Andre tried and failed to pronounce the unfamiliar phoneme.

“Close enough,” Zhenya said. “So who is who?”

Currently the only one of Nicklas’ many husbands who seemed to want to spend time near him was Andre, which suited Nicklas fine, by and large. He would speak to the bees otherwise, or nobody at all, and at least Andre was making an earnest effort to pretend to learn something. The others were in their new clearing, industriously fucking up construction of a low-roofed dwelling the way only a group of unsupervised young men could. “Andre, fetch the others. Take your time.”

Andre was about to protest, but then he seemed to get the message and ambled off around the garden wall, a wholly unnecessary sway in his hips. It did not escape Nicklas’ notice that Zhenya watched him go.

“You belong to Sasha?”

“Not for a long time,” Zhenya shrugged. “But yes, maybe still, who knows?”

“What do you want?”

“Usually? Enough sleep. Money. Good wine. Or bad wine.” He gestured at the hives. “You make mead?”

Against his will, Nicklas felt a tug of amusement. “On occasion.”

-

Several hours later darkness settled in, as well as the kind of drunkenness frowned upon by those whose adherence to the letter of Nicklas’ order was greater than their feeling for the spirit of it. He didn’t often drink his own brew to excess, but Zhenya was easy company, and paced him expertly.

The same could not be said for the rest of them, about half of his new spouses sprawled around the cool clearing in little groups, seeming to reel with the strength of the sweet liquor. Nicklas noticed Tom and Michael inviting Andre to join them behind the garden wall and silently wished them the best of the evening.

“I can’t believe you’re marry _all_ of them.”

“Counsel the Emperor not to leave loopholes,” Nicklas said, topping him up.

“Oh sure, when I see him.” Zhenya toasted him drunkenly from where he had come to rest, sprawled against the smooth stones of Nicklas’ small house. “Me and the Emperor, we best friends.”

Nicklas had revised his opinion of Zhenya’s age several times over the course of the evening and still couldn’t quite place it. “You mean the Emperor didn’t send you here to spy on us?”

Zhenya fixed him with one knowing blue eye, the other closed to narrow his view. “You hold drink okay, for a priest.”

“You pour yours away okay, for a legionary.”

Zhenya laughed at him. “What did you do to Sasha, really? He come back like you take him to the underworld.”

“I did nothing,” Nicklas admitted. “We spoke.”

“And he didn’t kill you.” Zhenya sounded resigned, as though Nicklas’ continued existence marked a blunder on Sasha’s part. “So now, real question. Why you call him Sasha?”

Nicklas no longer noticed the sound the bees made; he sometimes wondered if he ever had, or if he had been born knowing them as intimates, small bodies combining and fracturing in and out of wholes. He had held many queens in his lifetime, and knew the particular hum of a swarm in distress. If he were less aware of their fundamental disconnection from human thought he might claim he could recognize their mourning. He was not used to them cutting through the distant sound of the night birds with a furious inrush of vibration, all the hives behind the house roused at his slightly drunken shock.

Zhenya flattened himself against the stones, even the air seeming to stop moving before Nicklas closed his eyes and forced himself to calm. It had not— it had been many years since he had alarmed them so completely. “It’s all right,” he said, to whoever might be listening. To the bees, though they had no form of speech to respond to him, save in their slow calming.

There had been chatter. Now there was none.

Zhenya swallowed. “When he said not to fuck with the bees, I never think you are the bees.” Nicklas was about to respond until someone cleared his throat.

While Nicklas was distracted some of his husbands had achieved some state of dress to come and stand in what he suspected was meant to be some semblance of a menacing semi-circle. None of them approached intimidating, but en masse Nicklas couldn’t deny it was at least somewhat effective.

Zhenya laughed at them, arms open against the stones at his back. “Maybe we all relax again?”

“Maybe you tell us why Nicklas is upset,” Tom countered, roughness of his voice something Nicklas didn’t want to think too hard about.

“You really thinking you all married,” Zhenya said, quietly. “Oh no.”

“What makes a marriage but devotion?” Nicklas asked, trying very hard to keep the sarcasm far from his words. The way Zhenya rolled his eyes at him told him he had not succeeded. “Zhenya and I were just talking,” Nicklas said, louder. “We have a mutual acquaintance.”

“I thought you came out of a beehive like—” Andre started, before someone shushed him.

“There will be plenty to say in the morning,” Nicklas said. “I’m going to bed.” It seemed all of them held their breath as Nicklas rose and offered a hand to Zhenya, drawing him towards the doorway. “Goodnight.”

“Wait, is he—” Poor Andre would never get a whole question out at this rate but Nicklas couldn’t find it in himself not to be amused, even as the door shut behind him and his observant guest.

Zhenya looked around. There was not much to see in the darkness and Nicklas had long since given up on work which required lamplight. He would light a fire or he would wait until morning.

“No shutters?” Zhenya asked.

“So the bees can get in.”

“Just bees?”

“Birds, sometimes.” Nicklas arranged himself on the bed. “This is as much privacy as I can offer you.” Zhenya joined him, close enough that the heat of his body rose from his clothes. Nicklas reflected that perhaps this was also designed to provoke him. Nicklas felt out the side of his neck in the gloom and placed a hand there, fingers resting under the rigid architecture of his jaw. “You won’t get me this way either.”

“Not that kind of marriage, then.” Zhenya paused. “You really fucked him up, you know.”

Nicklas left his hand where it was. There were words forming, but their shape felt too large, the memories too old to be linear. “I knew him before he was a Roman,” Nicklas said simply. “If something has sent him back to me, I can’t tell which of us is being fucked.”

Zhenya laughed at him, mead sweet on his breath. “Priest, I have bad news. I think maybe you in big trouble.”

Privately, Nicklas agreed. “You are very lucky I don’t believe in harming the messenger.”

“Yeah, maybe you worry little more about making the Empire angry, little less about me.”

“You?” Nicklas said. “I’m not worried about you at all.” Maybe he should have been, but the familiarity was too great to discount; Nicklas’ incautious husbandry had led him here and of the many parables he’d decided long ago to discard one had always seemed to linger. He’d reap what he’d sown. Some seeds travelled on the wind, looking for places to take root. Some people knew when God was indifferent, even if they didn’t believe. “What will you tell him?”

Zhenya pulled away, though he was careful not to touch Nicklas in return. “Whatever he wants to know.”

-

In the morning Zhenya was gone.

Nicklas had not expected to sleep through his departure but he hadn’t expected him to stay, so only one of the two was a surprise.

He emerged from his bed to find Tom, Michael and Andre earnestly discussing which of them was going to ask Nicklas how to plant the season’s roots, overlooking that the planting season was past and they were idiots.

The shock came not long after Nicklas had banished his apprehension for the sake of his husbands and braced himself to visit the clearing they had made for themselves, where he found Zhenya cheerfully roasting some rabbits over a fire, entertaining a good ten of them with stories that involved a great deal of grinning. “Oh, you’re still here,” he said, unsure how he felt about it.

“Sure,” Zhenya said, breaking off in the middle of a sentence, something about cheating at dice. “You think I’m leaving?”

Nicklas, mind filled with possibilities and no shortage of apprehension, turned to leave them to it. There was nothing any of them could tell him that would damn them, precisely. Nicklas had already determined that if there was a price to be paid it would not fall on them.

There was never a shortage of work when one had built a life alone, but in the clear morning Nicklas found himself driven away from it.

There were many paths through the forest. The ones made for men had their hallmarks but so did the others, the boar-tracks and deer hides offering their own directions. He took the first one which made itself known to him, and went to think.

A bee followed, then more, until a fair number of them had made themselves into a cloak over his shoulders, patient when he brushed them from his throat. “I do wish you’d calm down,” he told them, knowing hypocrisy even as he said it. A while later, when he had reached a rock which seemed like a good place from which to watch the animals and settled himself, letting the bees disperse to pollinate, he invited his watcher to join him. “I hope you brought something to eat,” he said to the dappled shade some ways behind him. “Otherwise I’ll send you back.”

“You are fucking creepy,” Zhenya muttered, emerging through the brush with a pack over his shoulder. “This fun for you?”

“A little.”

Zhenya tossed him bread he recognised as his own. “If you tell me why you doing this, maybe I convince Sasha to leave you alone.”

“You won’t,” Nicklas said. “You already know, anyway, unless you’re just as stupid as you’re pretending.”

Zhenya watched the bees for a moment, standing with his arms crossed in an unconscious imitation of a legionary at rest. “Where you from?” He asked, finally.

“Rome.”

“Before.”

“I’m not sure,” Nicklas told him. “The North. I remember it being cold.”

“I see,” Zhenya said, leaning back against a tree the better to watch him, eyes darting back and forth, never quite settling for long. “I thought priest needs a temple.”

“A church.”

“Whatever.”

“A priest is anyone who has taken the vows and holds to them,” Nicklas said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t also paid for your freedom.”

Zhenya glanced at him. “Is not my freedom we talking about right now.”

“I’m glad to see he’s made good use of his, at least,” Nicklas said, holding himself rigidly still. “Tell him I’ve always considered it a gift.” Zhenya boggled at him. Nicklas tried not to enjoy it and failed. He really did have very large eyes under his heavy forehead. “He was the only thing I’ve ever bought, actually,” Nicklas mused. He dusted his hands on his thighs, too conscious of the sweat the confession had roused all over his chest, up his neck and down his back.

The memory was image, at this point. The narrative of it could be restored to linear time in words perhaps, but the way it struck him was how it always had, right from the start; rage and fear, and the only time Nicklas had ever felt in himself a compulsion external to him, conviction so whole that every possible consequence had become impossible to consider.

Nicklas had grown used to Rome, to the noise and chaos of it, to the endless hills and the casual daily cruelty of empire and commerce, but he had rarely been sent on errands. Maybe the Sister who had sent him had been trying to send him more into the world instead of letting him sit sideways to it as he had ever since his earliest days. Maybe she had also known it would be a test. To this day he could not bring himself to consider it a failure. That — those, a whole long string of them — came after, when Nicklas held a life in his hands he hadn’t ever known what to do with.

Nicklas had done his best to leave the memories in the past, where they belonged: bringing Sasha back to the monastery because it was impossible simply to strike someone from chains and declare them free, and walk away without responsibility. Learning him as Sasha gained new words, as he played with the children, as Nicklas fought not to grow attached to someone who couldn’t stay. Sasha belonged, for a time, to the Church, bought by its gold. He was not of them. It had not felt better, knowing that the Mother and Father tolerated him as an act of good on Nicklas’ part, to be watched and discussed, just as Nicklas was.

It had not felt better to know he couldn’t leave either, as a part of Nicklas which had been quietly starving began to feel full with every smile Sasha had ever coaxed from him. It had been the only right thing to do, asking the order to free him. Other possibilities did not bear thinking about, like how long it had taken him to do it, and how badly he had simply wanted to keep him, and let them be prisoners together.

Zhenya muttered a little curse Nicklas was shocked to recognize, language striking a strange note between them. “I knew this is going to be drama,” he said. “Sasha, oh you know, big commander, training the legion, he’s normal guy.” He shook his head despairingly. “Go watch my priest, Zhenya. Fuck me, I not paid enough.” He eyed the bread Nicklas was holding. “You eating that?”

Nicklas gave it back to him. “Long walk back to camp?”

“Oh no, I go back already.” Zhenya shook the crust at him, spreading crumbs for the birds. “Sasha’s on his way by nightfall.”

Well. Nicklas could have seen that one coming. Then again being well-acquainted with mystery didn’t always mean he enjoyed it. “Fortunate for you that I took a vow of peace,” Nicklas said, suddenly suffused with an urgent buzzing, holding back a catastrophic fury only because there was a protection in what he was, in what he’d promised to hold himself to. Any vow had a power to bind.

“Counting on it,” Zhenya said, a little bit too kindly. “I’m remember you don’t hurt the messenger.”

-

By nightfall Nicklas had said his piece. It didn’t prevent an outcry from the little commune he’d accidentally created, but most of their questions boiled down to “Are we going to be executed?” to which Nicklas could with reasonable confidence assure them was unlikely for the time being.

“Wait,” Andre said, inverse of his earlier question dawning on him as Nicklas was folding his hands inside his sleeves, the better to get a firm grip on his own wrists to prevent untoward gestures. “Are _you_ going to be executed?”

“Maybe,” Nicklas allowed. “But they’ll have to take it up with the Church first.”

“Really?” Zhenya whispered from where he was unobtrusively supervising.

Nicklas ignored him. He had instructions for the care of his home and then, after much avoiding of eyes, someone piped up: “what about the bees?”

“The bees will go where they want,” Nicklas said. If that meant he could keep a shred of his confidence he would welcome them, as he always had.

They had already begun to form a shape, roused from their hives.

By the time Sasha arrived, flanked by two men Nicklas could have told him he wouldn’t need, they had made their decision, flitting around with abandon, some of them brushing his cheeks and nose as if to remind him of their insult at being disturbed.

The man to the left of Sasha cleared his throat. “By order of—”

“Shut up,” Sasha said. “Nicky. I never think you leave Rome.”

“So you’ll take me back?” Nicklas asked, biting the inside of his cheek.

“Is on the way.”

“Just me,” Nicklas said. “They’re married men. They stay.”

Sasha smiled at him. It was neither comforting nor wholly unwelcome, a paradox Nicklas couldn’t bring himself to examine. “You ever just you?”

Nicklas almost smiled back. “Arrest me.”

“I always missing the good stuff,” Zhenya muttered, carefully shepherding Nicklas towards Sasha, to the whispered objections of the crowd. “Your husbands better be fun.”

“You have my blessing. They’re not bound to my vows,” Nicklas told him, before Sasha finally came close enough to fasten a hand around Nicklas’ wrist, heedless of the bees that crawled over his fingers.

They had always liked him. Nicklas had never learned not to find it extraordinary.

“We a long way from Rome,” Sasha whispered, close enough that Nicklas could pick out the grey flecks in his wide-spaced blue eyes. “Weeks.”

“I’m sure I’ll find some way to pass the time,” Nicklas said, offering his other hand.

-  
FOUR  
-

To say that Nicklas came quietly would only have been the truth on the surface. As long as Sasha had known him — a short enough span at the time, but now when he looked at him memory came back in bursts of difference — Nicklas had always been quiet.

He had a pale watchfulness Sasha had not found unsettling as such but had always been aware of. Maybe it was the way Nicklas’ eyes were such a strikingly un-Roman colour, a clear northern green, pupils just different enough in size to be noticeable.

As a boy on the very cusp of manhood Nicklas had been soft all over, soft gold hair and a soft small mouth, a soft, rounded face and long, soft hands. Sasha had felt rough in contrast, unsure why he found him so compelling when every standard Sasha knew said that Nicklas had been treated too gently; unbloodied, untested, unfit for war. None of these things were true then, just as Nicklas’ quiet now was the pregnant quiet of a resting storm and not the acquiescence of a cowed hostage.

“Aren’t you going to chain him?”

“Hmm?” Sasha was wrested from his introspective staring by the unwelcome question. He had several very good centurions. Usually, Holtby was one of them. Originally a Briton as far as Sasha could tell, he had a great head for dice and the alcohol tolerance of a seasoned campaigner, as well as being reliably intelligent. He was not prone to stupid questions. Sasha took another look at Nicklas, walking beside Sasha’s horse with the kind of serene expression Sasha remembered only with trepidation. “Why?”

“You’re welcome to try,” Nicklas said, with ominous calm.

“No thanks,” Holtby said, after considering the situation.

Nicklas looked up at him, resting a hand on his horse’s shoulder. “Dissent in the ranks, Sasha?”

“You really have to marry every single man in town? Maybe you mind your own business.” A bee, clinging gently to Nicklas’ hair, buzzed its way up to settle on the pommel of Sasha’s saddle. Sasha offered it a finger, smooth motion of the walking horse making it easier to keep a steady hand. “You too,” he told it. Across the path, to his left, Holtby stared at him. Sasha shrugged. “Get used to it,” he counseled. “They not going anywhere.”

Nicklas’ hand had not strayed from the side of Sasha’s horse, close enough to Sasha’s knee that he felt as though every span of distance between their skins was becoming slowly charged.

Sasha only lasted half the walk back to camp before he gave in and hauled Nicklas up behind him, ignoring the speaking looks his centurions exchanged when they thought he wasn’t watching. This was going to be a disaster either way. He might as well get it done faster.

“You could still let me go,” Nicklas whispered, resting his chin on Sasha’s shoulder, just in the sliver of skin where fabric and armour parted.

“You say you a liar, not marrying everyone who says yes?”

Nicklas huffed in his ear. “Like fuck I will.”

Sasha shrugged, dislodging him. “Your vows more important than mine?”

The weight that was Nicklas against his back grew heavier, but he didn’t answer.

-

The were on the move by nightfall of the following day. Moving a thousand newly-recruited men who were barely more than boys for the most part took no small amount of work. Sasha was good at his job, even if it turned out that without Kuzya around to handle his correspondence by forcing him to do it his efficiency had taken something of a blow.

Sasha had a system, though. Sasha had a rhythm.

Sasha also had a priest at his heels, playing at obedience, wreaking unholy havoc on Sasha’s routine.

On a real campaign there would be camp followers, craftspeople, a cadre of servants and captives and legionaries he could task as guards. Now he had reluctant draftees and overstretched optios and noble-born tribunes who didn’t know their asses from their elbows about a real march.

Sasha would have been happy to lead by example, if his example wasn’t a dispute with some strange God about the nature of marriage and a prisoner he couldn’t leave to anyone else. The irony did not escape him, but that was a different thing, a painful sore which had scabbed but never fully knit into scar tissue.

Nicklas seated himself in the corner of Sasha’s tent where every single one of Sasha’s subordinates could see him when they came for orders, a small swarm of soporific bees spread around him as though that were a perfectly normal state of being.

There was no shortage of yelping when he stirred. Sasha was so relieved to break camp he almost welcomed it when Holtby sidled up to him to relay some version of the wildfire of rumour Nicklas had produced. Unfortunately, as much as a part of Sasha wanted to see what would have happened had he treated Nicklas as most Romans would treat a prisoner, instinct had served him very well up until now. Sasha knew better than to leave him to someone else. Nicklas was riding beside him, conspicuous and austere in his grey robes.

Despite all of that the day’s march progressed and Sasha worked himself back to some semblance of composure, not least because their pace was, in a word, pathetic. That gave Sasha a problem to solve, such that he could almost forget Nicklas’ tangible presence.

When Sasha assigned some more seasoned men to pitch his tent while he set the perimeter he came back to find Nicklas watching them carefully, a small island of stillness in the organized chaos of an army on the move.

It struck Sasha all over again that he really had taken him. “You could be useful,” he said, waving off the salutes before they really got started.

“I could leave.” Nicklas’ tone was observational at best. “Is that useful enough?”

Sasha planted himself next to him, close enough that Nicky’s elbow brushed the buckles of his armour. Sasha half expected a swarm to manifest itself at the intrusion but only a few of Nicklas’ bees were keeping him company, perhaps scattered to gather what they could while the camp settled for the night. Sasha didn’t have to answer him. “You hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Eat anyway.” Sasha’s table was never solitary. He didn’t consider it entertainment so much as a softer kind of obligation, but he did enjoy conversation and the gradual lifting of suspicion from newer officers. Tonight he had expected Oshie, maybe, who was having trouble with an optio under his command, or maybe one of the braver tribunes who could stand to socialise with him, but Nicklas would be there regardless. There were many ways to conquer fear. Inviting it to dinner could be one of them, especially when fear wasn’t in a position to refuse.

-

The first time Sasha ever ate with Nicky they were sitting on a set of steps in the shade, halfway up one of Rome’s eternal hills to the monastery nestled at the top, a strange place buried in vegetation too deep for a city.

Sasha had not had any choice but to follow him and very few words to offer, but somehow Nicky had seen the need for rest, leaving room on the dusty stone next to him, meticulously partitioning a loaf of bread to share, brushing away a furred little worker bee which had settled on it.

Below their feet Rome had seemed magnificent. Sasha had been furious with himself for thinking it. They’d eaten in silence, Sasha sore where the mark was on his forearm, angry and red, until Nicky had tugged his wrist over to see.

He’d said something, just one word, and pressed his thumb into the brand.

Sasha, if he’d had any words to give him, still wouldn’t have been able to thank him. It had hurt more in that instant than anything he’d ever felt before or since, a shocking burst of divine agony that had lanced through him so violently he thought his body might shake apart.

When Nicklas had let go the mark was gone.

Nicklas had finished his bread when Sasha was too nauseated to eat it, seeming ready to wait an eternity until Sasha stopped shaking enough to keep climbing.

Of all the things Nicky had said to him since that he’d understood perfectly, Sasha had always wondered what word Nicklas had spoken to give him back the first of his freedoms, but he’d never told him, and Sasha had never known how to ask.

-

Dinner was a disaster.

Whatever it was about Nicky that gave him the ability to seem as though the world didn’t touch him the way it did other men, it was only Sasha who found it fascinating rather than insulting. That was very much not the case for the oldest tribune Sasha had been saddled with.

After a bee flew up his nose and caused such a flurry of panic as he tried desperately to get it out —screaming about going back to the good old days when good Romans were born in Rome and everyone knew the only thing to do with priests was feed them to lions in the arena— that Sasha was forced to drench him with wine to calm him down.

Sasha thought very, very hard about revising his position of leniency.

Nicklas wasn’t laughing when the tribune was gently escorted to the medicus, but he was making no effort to disguise his satisfaction either, which was worse. “Get out,” Sasha ordered him, before he did anything regretful. “If you not back before midnight, I set dogs on you and behead you myself.”

Nicky smiled beatifically at him and made himself scarce. Sasha waited until he could take at least one deep breath without laughing hysterically at the image of a nobleman falling over sideways while frantically scrabbling at his face before he stuck his head out of the tent to send someone to fetch him Holtby.

He arrived just as Sasha had finished passing off his dinner things to one of the younger men on camp duty to be washed, having to do it himself since he’d given Kuzya a more important task.

Holtby saluted smartly before Sasha could wave it off, standing at attention just inside the tent flap.

Sasha wished he’d actually been the one to come to dinner but politics existed everywhere and not even Sasha was immune. “What you know about priests?” Sasha asked him, when he’d finally sat down.

“Not much,” Holtby admitted carefully. “Don’t they believe in peace and stuff? Something about the god being a man?”

“The divine made flesh,” Sasha intoned by rote. “Is not very peaceful.”

Holtby shrugged. “The way I hear it, people are talking about whether he’s Discord in disguise so that’s half right I guess.”

“What else?”

Holtby looked him dead in the eye, which was never a terrific sign. “That you’ve lost your mind and he’s bewitching you, and you should have executed him and drafted the rest.”

Sasha felt a headache building up the back of his neck. “Nobody think what happens if the Church hear about it? We execute someone who take the vows like it’s old days without making trial first?”

“Hey, you asked.” Holtby shifted in his chair, helmet tucked under his arm following his movement with its empty judgemental eyes. “Uh, not to be that guy but you really think it’s worth taking him all the way to Rome?”

“You don’t know the Church,” Sasha said. “Keep listening. If it get really bad maybe we have to think something else.”

“Like what?”

Several possibilities sprang to mind, each of them pragmatic and justifiable. Kill him and make a statement about contradicting Imperial authority. Leave him and come up with an explanation for the missing numbers. Treat him as a man and not as something inexplicable. None of them encompassed the real problem, which was that Sasha couldn’t stand to compromise with himself again, not when he’d worked so hard to leave the severed thread that was Nicklas in the past where it belonged. “I don’t know, that’s why is for future. You can go.”

-

Nicklas was back before midnight, just in time to interrupt Sasha’s nocturnal brooding.

He brought the smell of the outside with him, greenery and evening, mud up his calves when he set aside his robe to leave just a tunic. Colourless as it was Sasha still had difficulty looking away. He’d never really thought Nicklas would be able to take the vows and commit to the life he had never seemed to want, but here he was, dressed the part at least.

“Marry anyone while you’re out?”

“No point, you already drafted them.”

Sasha considered him, all his papers forgotten for the moment. He rolled them up, deciding he was finished for the night. “Come help me undress,” he said. “I leave Kuzya with your husbands, so now is your job.”

Nicklas pushed his loose hair back behind his ears, fixing him with an indecipherable stare. “Still not afraid to get stung?”

“I never have problems with your bees.” Sasha held his arms out to the sides, stiff buckles on his light armour exposed by the movement.

Nicklas’ mouth tightened, and the sudden glimpse of the boy he’d been lasted just long enough for Sasha to wonder whether inviting him closer was the greatest mistake he’d made yet. Nicklas approached anyway, setting his fingers to the buckles after a moment of consideration at their shape. Soon enough he stripped the light plate off Sasha’s chest, exposing him to the evening’s chill. “The rest?”

Sasha nodded, mouth suddenly very dry.

“I took the vows after you left,” Nicklas said, when Sasha was skinned to the waist, once again speaking to his back. “Remember we made a pact.”

“So you take vows never to touch anyone, keep just one god, spread the word? Is not what you wanted.”

“And you joined the Empire that took you in chains. You hated them.”

Sasha had hated a lot of things. Sasha had even hated Nicky once. It had only lasted an instant, but he remembered it for how wrong it was, the sensation of bitterness that this pale, sunburned boy could presume to buy him from a hot square layered with the awful dust of midsummer in Rome. “So did you,” Sasha said.

Nicky laid a cool finger on his back, under the shoulder where an arrow had once missed his spine, penetrating only deep enough for pain and not much else. “I didn’t hate Rome.”

“You going to heal that too?” Sasha asked, holding himself at ease. “Warn me, maybe.”

“It’s too old,” Nicky said, before he drew in a breath and stepped away. “Never mind.”

Sasha reached for him without thinking, turning to grab him before he could slip away into another one of his awful silences. “Why didn’t you come with me?”

“I thought you’d go _home._ ”

Sasha hadn't told him otherwise, he realised. He had spoken of where he’d come from, the far reaches beyond Rome’s arms, but he hadn’t told Nicklas he wouldn’t have known how to return in defeat. Even if he’d been too young to be a mercenary when he’d first taken up a sword it had grown to fit. That year in the monastery on the hill hadn’t instilled in him a sense of purpose for peace any more than it had forced belief on Nicklas. Sasha had known how to fight. The rest, all the ways in which he’d proved himself, had come with age and practice, and the freedom to pledge his sword to whoever he chose. “Go home like you go home?”

Nicklas twisted neatly out of Sasha’s grip, sudden loss of contact sending a thrum of warning up his arm. Nicklas didn’t look any different, a mess of gold hair and the smooth, strong curves of a soft body gently honed by hard work, but beneath that Sasha — he had no words for it, but he thought, _felt_ — there was a vein of hurt Sasha had bitten at.

“Yes, go home to where they gave me up as a sacrifice, just so the Church could send someone after me to claim me back.”

Sasha, despite all appearances, had not spent fifteen years wondering what had happened to him. Maybe that was because Nicklas had seemed like a fixed point, a person attached to a single time and a single place, sitting in the unnaturally verdant garden he always claimed he had nothing to do with. Keeping easy company with the bees, eating stolen sweets from the monastery kitchen and pretending to ignore the way the brothers and sisters of his order watched him so carefully. Maybe it was because Nicklas had seized at something in Sasha that felt understood even without words, tied into the sanctity of the walls which enclosed them. It had taken him a long time before he realised that the reason Nicklas never ventured far was because someone would always be sent to find him. They didn’t trust him. He’d never given them reason to, and bringing Sasha back with him had been a failed trial along with all the other tests of his faith.

“You think the Church will protect you?” Sasha asked him, fearing the answer.

“Forgive me,” Nicklas said quietly, “for wanting to stop others being taken where they didn’t want to go.”

Sasha rarely felt cold. Maybe it was the blood of his birth and maybe it was the vitality of his body, but he seemed to find warmth often and easily, by himself or with others. Sasha had known many bodies, but none that had the capacity to affect him the way Nicklas did. The chill settled in him across the distance between them. Sasha fought against it, wanting the sensation of Nicklas’ fingertips at his back again, wanting to draw him close and hold him. “Pass me my cloak,” he said instead.

-  
FIVE  
-

The problem was that the order had expected miracles.

What constituted a miracle was the subject of much debate, which would have been fine had Nicklas not been the focus of it, though of course his participation was only required by way of his presence.

At seventeen he had grown taller than almost any of the other novices, but had yet to take any of the rites required for priesthood.

Partly it was because he was prone to letting his mind focus on what he found compelling and almost nothing else, rejecting liturgy and form until the Mother and Father of his order called him to discipline himself lest he be disciplined. Partly it was the fundamental disconnection of his experience with God.

He was taught that miracles came from God, the one God who had chosen to be human for a brief moment and then been given back to the greater whole through what Nicklas considered a fairly gruesome execution.

That was all fine and good as stories went, save that a story never could explain why Nicklas had begun to scare people long before he knew that particular myth with outbursts of childish fury which often resulted in bee stings.

Maybe he was miraculous, but it wasn’t by choice or intent, and it certainly wasn’t because Nicklas had some kind of deep belief in a God that couldn’t even last long enough as a human to tell a more interesting yarn.

Of course, belief being what it was, none of his objections ever quite found voice, because God had reasons for everything, even Nicklas’ refusal to sink fully into faith.

More practical explanations might have hinged on the kind of natural mistrust a boy might develop upon narrowly escaping being claimed by very different gods with a different manner of execution. Depending on one’s perspective the travelling sister who claimed him for the god made flesh might have saved him. Whether she’d have done so —in violation of her mandate to persuade rather than, say, to remove children from sacred groves and leave in the night— if she hadn’t witnessed the outburst of Nicklas’ temper the last time it truly got away from him was still up for debate.

She had taught him his very first word of Latin, and though the memories were hazy with age, Nicklas still wasn’t sure if surviving a blizzard constituted a miracle. People did that all the time. Maybe it had something to do with the man he’d killed and the woman he had healed, but he felt the bees had at least the better part of the blame for the former and the latter he had never been able to repeat.

She’d been convinced of his holiness anyway, and taken him from the grove where he had been spared by the gods of winter. Rome enfolded him in its heat and language as age had crept up on him and with it the ways of the monastery in Rome which housed the most treasured and sacred. And Nicklas himself, who was neither but was meant to be both.

He hadn’t made himself very many friends among those who truly believed, nor even among those of his own age who had found the Church in one way or another. He took advantage of the clement weather to sleep outside, and every so often his Sister would bring home another boy or another girl.

The youngest tended to stay near him until someone whispered enough to bring them indoors.

Once a tiny child —given to the order for a reason Nicklas couldn’t fathom— came to him with a cut, deep enough to seep blood out under her sleeve past its bandage. All he’d been able to do was to take her back to the brother who tended wounds and talk to her while it was patched again. The part of him which lived beneath his skin, the part that uncurled itself sometimes when he was least expecting it, blooming out in response to things Nicklas had no control over, stayed stubbornly dormant.

In the rarest moments of his adolescence he sought counsel, going to sit in the space designated for God, a rounded ceiling like a beehive housing beneath it… nothing. An empty room filled with the thick scent of incense and nothing of nature in it.

He had been sitting in there one morning, hands tucked between his knees, curled up into himself trying to access that particular euphoria he witnessed sometimes, the rapturous calm that descended on his peers and teachers, when the Sister who had found him came to join him.

“You’ve been praying a lot lately,” she said.

He hadn’t been, but he’d long since learned not to correct them.

“Have you given any thought to your vows?”

Nicklas had shrugged again, willing her to go away.

“I have need of something from the goldsmiths,” she said, after his silence persisted into awkwardness. “Will you go down to the city for me?”

“What if I don’t come back?”

She’d patted his knee, too kindly. “I have faith.”

He had come back with the wrong kind of gold, but he had indeed come back, bringing with him a restless, awful want, and the hot feeling beneath his skin that always heralded disaster.

He’d put his fingers on a wound and the rage it drew from him had erased it, fire kindling in an instant so unexpected it had almost cored him.

He still wasn’t sure it was a miracle.

-

Travelling with a large group of men was different to living with them, though he suspected the smell was more or less similar. Maybe with fewer overtones of horse but in this regard Nicklas had no claim of immunity. By the fifth day he found himself not noticing, and by the sixth it barely seemed abnormal to wake before dawn when Sasha did and watch him as he almost single handedly seemed to move the masses.

Nicklas had ample opportunity to slip away from the column. Sasha didn’t watch him at every moment but Nicklas felt his gaze nonetheless; referred through his men, travelling across the whispers that followed him when he walked to the edge of the camp each night to wait for the bees to find him.

The nights were strangest.

Nicklas had not slept next to someone for a very long time. In all his years of wandering he had kept his vows, knowing them to be a kind of protective carapace in which to convince himself he could live. He existed in his body, and could not be said to have made attempt to distance himself from its needs; he breathed, he ate, he accepted its demands when it made them, but to experience desire was a distant memory. Arousal, yes, that was an intermittent companion he didn’t welcome, but it was reflexive. Desire was a different beast.

In the years since he had last seen Sasha unclothed Nicklas had done his best not to think of it, how close he’d come to ruining himself over the feeling of his skin, over the sound of his breath. Nicklas had wanted so badly to believe that one day he would understand God, whatever God was, and so afraid of what he wanted from Sasha; the possibility of it, the closeness of another body, the temptation of it.

Sasha slept deeply, noisily sometimes, with the restless movements of someone dreaming.

He always had.

Decorated by the weight of his uniform Nicklas could almost ignore it, the magnetic pull of his body. It had not come back gradually. The desire to be near him had kindled itself as quickly as a spark caught at dry grass, the part of Nicklas that had lain unwatered and carefully fallow drawn up close to his skin, waiting.

There was very little distance in a camp. Nicklas did his best to find it, though that set its own challenges.

Wandering too far to the edges always seemed to provoke the cautious intervention of someone trying to make sure he wasn’t about to run away, which felt redundant at this point. “I really think I’d have gone by now if I was going to,” Nicklas told tonight’s shadow.

“I wake up, you not there, maybe I think the worst,” Sasha said, resolving from the moonless night looking groggy and irritated in what Nicklas was horrified to realise was his own outer robe, grey and travel-stained, too short for him in the arms and open all down the front. Sasha came to stand next to him, radiating heat. “You never give your word.”

Nicklas should move away. He spent the time he had to in touching him already, committing to memory the marks of the life he’d led out of Nicklas’ sight, learning again how the heaviness of his form disguised grace. Nicklas stood still as Sasha settled in close, and then, after a moment, Sasha laid an arm over his shoulders.

He stared out at the darkness and pleaded with himself: _please, if you have any mercy left for me, leave this in the past where it belongs._

Sasha, whatever strange, distant land he was from, had carried from it an easiness of touch that made Nicklas a youth again in an instant.

“I give you my word,” Nicklas rasped.

“Thank you,” Sasha said. “So why you can’t sleep?”

“Oh, the prospect of execution isn’t enough?”

“You not getting executed for weeks, probably,” Sasha pointed out. “What else?”

“You snore.”

Sasha chuckled, laugh drawing Nicklas closer. “Yes, Kuzya say the same thing.”

Nicklas’ questions were endless, building each on the previous one until all he had was the kind of curiosity which existed in the spaces between words. Sasha had lived a whole life out of Nicklas’ sight, and what he remembered of him — his good humour, his quickness, his very private restlessness — was not all there was to see but was all Nicklas could look at, wondering how time had changed him.

He would have to face the Church. He would have to convince them that what he had done was in service to God and peace, and that he was truly deserving of their protection. Sasha would have to convince the Empire he served of the opposite.

Nicklas had not let himself use his anger; if there was one thing he had taken from the depth of his education it was that fury was something God lived within but that did not belong to Nicklas. Anger was cleansing, purposeful. Anger pulled focus, gave weight to the righteous, which Nicklas was not.

Tucked up against Sasha’s side again Nicklas again felt it slipping from him and disappearing into the contact of their bodies.

“I went to look for you,” Sasha said. “After I’m promoted from auxiliaries. That climb seem longer every time.”

Nicklas became suddenly very conscious of the gentle hum of life around them, the distant sounds of sleeping soldiers and the contented vibration of the few bees which had not found the journey too arduous to stay with him or the few solitary pollinators who sought him out of some insect curiosity. He held his hand to for one to land in, barely a weight in his palm. “They didn’t tell me.”

“They didn’t let me in.” Sasha’s shrug went right through Nicklas’ chest, his palm flattening down against the tunic which was the last pretense of a barrier between them.

Nicklas’ open hand found Sasha’s wrist almost without his permission, save that to deny the urge he had to feel the heavy bones beneath his fingers was his, base and forbidden.

Nicklas had sworn to forgo pleasures of the flesh and had held himself to it, finding it less onerous than a life behind walls. Nicklas was many things, but he was not an oath breaker. If he was not a good priest, he was at least a true one.

He had not expected for his recklessness in love to come back to haunt him, looped around him as a hand in the dark, brought back to him as a question. He had asked it not to.

-  
SIX  
-

Nicklas’ parole meant something. Sasha knew him enough not to think it was only circumstantial. It didn’t feel better to receive it.

It didn’t make it less improper to touch him, to _want_ to touch him, to reach out in the gloom of his tent and brush against his ankle, to be investigated by the bees which came in the morning before the sun.

It didn’t make it easier to bring him slowly north to Rome as a dog to heel.

Sasha couldn’t bring himself to let go the pretense of needing Nicklas’ quick fingers to dress him, or ignore the way Nicklas brushed the hair off his forehead one morning and then caught himself, fury kindling in his strange eyes. “You can go,” Sasha told him, touching a finger to his wrist.

Nicklas went without a single sharp word of reprisal.

Sasha worried.

He worried more when he came back to his tent after seeing to a training exercise run by one of the tribunes, who still hadn’t gotten the hang of breaking camp in a hurry. It didn’t bode very well for actual warfare, should they face any, but that was many months from now, so Sasha had some time. However, Nicklas was nowhere to be seen, though a few curious bees informed him he would not be far.

It wouldn’t do for Sasha to tramp around camp looking for a man who was ostensibly a prisoner under threat of execution, but it was verging on dark. He could get away with it.

He found him in almost the same fashion he had come across him in the forest, opening himself to the pull of strangeness that made some things visible only when looked for.

Nicklas was sitting silently by one of the many fires dotting the camp in neat lines, faced by a small crowd of young men, all of them watching him with some degree of awe.

Sasha paused for a moment, examining the scene. One of the boys clutched a small wooden icon hanging from a cord around his neck in the shape of the crosses Sasha had always found morbid. Some of the others had their heads together, muttering over clasped hands.

Nicklas was sitting with a mug clenched between his palms and a muscle jumping in his jaw.

He wasn’t looking at Sasha. It was so rare for him not to know he was being watched that Sasha felt he had to commit it to memory; the firelight catching in his hair, the fixed way he was staring into the flame as though it would tell him a secret if he demanded it with enough force. It felt as though Sasha had briefly stepped out of the world, tableau a glimpse into a different reality, one in which he could see Nicklas like this all the time, grown into unwanted holiness.

Then Nicklas saw him, eyes flicking up and away, seeming to remember the circle which had gathered around him. “Are you done?” He asked them.

The prayers stopped abruptly. “Father?”

“God will hear you whether I’m here or not,” he said, glancing at Sasha again before draining his cup and handing it back to the boy with the cross. “It might even be more likely.”

“Will you not offer us a blessing?”

“Yes, Nicky, offer them a blessing,” Sasha said, pitched just enough to carry. It was probably very mean of him to make them all jump, but he waved away their anxious salutes with a small smile. “No, no. I want to hear.”

Nicklas glared at him. “A blessing for ill manners, then.”

“Yours or mine?”

Nicklas bared his little teeth. One of Nicklas’ new flock started praying again. Nicklas sighed, resting a hand, after a moment’s hesitation, on the crown of his head. “A blessing,” he said quietly, “for travellers.”

Sasha waited for him to take his leave and walk a bit from the fire before he moved closer, drawn in by Nicklas’ sidelong glance. “Don’t say a word.”

“No blessing for love and marriage?”

Nicklas tucked a strand of hair behind his ear, eyes tightening at the corners, revealing a small fan of new lines. “Fertility and fucking,” he said. “Chaos in your ranks.”

“Maybe really is a miracle if you make fertility here.”

Nicklas shoved him sideways, forcing Sasha to catch his balance as quietly as possible lest the perpetual audience of resting soldiers see him fall. When he looked back at Nicklas, he did not think he imagined the serene expression on his face only setting in as replacement for a smirk Sasha had not seen in many, many years.

A spoken word had power, Sasha knew. There were many ways to bind someone, and just as many to bless. Sasha had always thought of chaos as formative, as potential. He had been on battlefields enough times to know that humans held it within them, unwitting. He had not thought of it as a blessing before.

-

Sasha took himself to bed as usual, falling into sleep as though pushed off a cliff into its waiting arms. He often dreamed. Strange, twisted things which lingered into morning but faded away in the daylight. Plenty of people had remarked on it, but Sasha, rarely given time to dwell on them, made no effort to remember their details. He rested well enough.

It was rarer to have a night without sound and image. Paradoxically, their absence left him unsettled.

After a night of silent sleep he woke before dawn to find Nicklas sitting on the floor with a small swarm in his cupped hands, cool air flooding the tent from the wide open entrance. He was bent over them, his curtain of unkempt curls revealing only the curve of his forehead and the end of his pointed nose. The only noise was a sussurating hum from the insects, even last night’s breeze gone still.

“What’s wrong?” Sasha croaked, throat dry.

Nicklas opened his hands, dispersing his creatures. A few clung to him, as they usually did, but Nicklas combed them from his hair with gentle fingers, straightening to sweep it back over his shoulders. “How should I know?” He asked. “I hear there are still oracles in Greece. Ask one of them.”

Nevertheless, something was wrong. Sasha had a sense for it. Something was out of place, disordered. He gestured for a cup. Nicklas rolled his eyes but went to fetch it anyway, going outside to fill it.

After a moment, he came back with empty hands. “Come outside,” he said quietly.

Sasha was not dressed, but it didn’t matter. It was still spring-cold in the mornings, mistier the farther north they travelled. This morning the air hung silent over the camp, though it was nearing the time when they would wake.

Nicklas had his hand in the water pot. His eyes were closed, sound of liquid moving as he displaced it far too loud. He pulled his hand out, examining his own wet fingers. “You drank it?”

Sasha shrugged. He used the same supplies as anyone else. “Looks fine.”

Nicklas bent over the mouth of the pot, a crease between his faint eyebrows.

Worry prickled through him. “Nicky—”

Nicklas tipped the pot over, an unconscionable waste of resources that Sasha immediately railed at, but Nicklas crouched down to scrape at the bottom. He withdrew his hand. The blackness coating his nails looked like the rot which settled into a bad wound. “If you want your men to live you’ll wake them.”

Sasha stared at him, shocked for a moment too long. Nicklas met his eyes. Then he let out a long breath, mask of serenity settling back over his face, and it was only then that Sasha realised it had been gone.

Nicklas didn’t say a word before he walked away.

 _Chaos,_ Sasha thought, word floating into his mind. Discord in disguise.

-

Sickness was never pretty. There was no real way around it, the grinding halt of dozens of stricken men in the countryside more than halfway back to Rome mired in the mess and panic of failing bodies.

The thickness of it was as much misery as it was contamination, which only made it worse.

If Kuzya were here he’d have cursed a blue streak and burned enough herbs to choke a blacksmith, but instead Sasha just had officers.

“I knew he was a bad omen!”

Sasha pinched the bridge of his nose, shouting beginning to set a pounding throb in his skull. “It just bad water.”

Several voices were clamouring for attention; Sasha tried his best to give it to them. tribunes and centurions asking for direction, the chief medicus stretched thin, supply master demanding enough men to check the rest of the water when Sasha had few to spare.

His tent, even perpetually open now, began to feel small and close, fabric walls seeming to bend in towards him.

Nicklas was somewhere, probably. He would be out of sight if he knew what was good for him; a camp full of sick men was a superstitious animal.

“Praefectus?”

“Out,” Sasha commanded, blinking against the headache threatening to overcome him. The shuffle of feet as they obeyed was unbearably loud.

Someone risked a hand on his shoulder, heavy through his armour. Sasha shrugged it off, but —oh, that wasn’t right. It didn’t budge. He focused. Holtby’s face swam into view. “centurion. Don’t touch.”

“Can you stand if I let go?” Holtby tested his theory. Sasha staggered, catching himself on his desk, leaning back against it, hoping it would take his weight. It creaked, but it held. “The priest is gone,” Holtby said, hands still held up to catch Sasha if he fell.

“No he’s not,” Sasha said, irritated.

Holtby looked back over his shoulder, stepping in too close. He’d was too hot, everything was far too warm. Sasha should push him away. In a moment. “Praefectus, I really think—”

Sasha didn’t catch what Holtby thought, sinking like a stone into a gentle blackness entirely unlike sleep.

-

They’d made a pact once, he and Nicklas.

It wasn’t a vow, or an oath. Neither of them swore on anything greater than themselves. That was the point. Nicklas wasn’t a believer, despite all the best efforts of his order. Sasha had begun to see it in traces, watching as he slowly began to understand their words. They coaxed him towards the temple, and he skirted himself away from it. He had a room, a tiny little cave that was cool and dark all year, which he gave to Sasha. He kept himself outside. He mouthed the words when Sasha sat next to him in their empty house for their strange god, but didn’t speak them. He had a petulant set to his face every time he cut his hair, and what serenity he’d acquired fit him as badly as his clothes. He had a foul mouth, often kept tightly closed until only Sasha could hear him.

Sasha himself was a curiosity, neither bound to labour nor officially freed. Nicklas had removed the brand Sasha had been given at his capture, but Sasha spoke only bare Latin before Nicklas had begun to teach him. None of the black-robed priests seemed to wish to interfere, watching them carefully from a distance Sasha hadn’t understood until it became obvious that Nicklas was an oddity, a prospect, a relic in a case, and he was doing something strange in speaking to Sasha.

He was also a boy, who jabbed Sasha under the ribs with his slim fingers when Sasha pestered him, and revealed a big, unexpected laugh when Sasha did the same. Sasha had wanted to kiss him desperately, this odd, pale, holy creature with tangled hair, so one day he had. He was unprepared for the awful wounded noise Nicklas had made before he pushed him away.

Nicklas had disappeared into the great, domed building for hours, leaving Sasha aching and confused, pacing the walls.

The priests had rhythms, routines, though Nicklas rarely kept to them. Sasha, surly and hurt, gave thought to how he’d besiege this place, pacing the wall with one hand dragging along the stones, assuming he would be left alone.

He was surprised by the appearance of a slender, austere woman in black who began to pace him, no higher than his shoulder. She came and went, this one. _She_ didn’t have eyes on her constantly, watching her like some new kind of animal. “Hello, little warrior,” she said, after offering him the unwanted blessings of her god. “You’re troubled.”

Sasha bristled. He had not been little for many years. Still, Nicklas spoke to this one sometimes. Sasha didn’t know her name, just that she was referred to as Sister, as Nicky was Brother more often than he was Nicklas. Sasha had learned plenty of polite greetings, and chose to use none of them. “You watch him so much. Why?”

She walked beside him for a while. “Some who are touched by God do not know how to accept their gifts.”

Sasha thought of the press of Nicklas’ lips, soft and warm and yielding before he had pulled himself back. “Is gift? Never--” he searched for the word, frustrated. “You don’t have husband? You think about God always?”

She placed a hand on his bare arm, drawing him to a stop, looking up into his eyes. “You don’t understand. We may marry, those of us who wish to. But ourselves, our bodies, they are God’s only. Those of us who take the vows, we offer back what was given to us, so that we may serve no other. Nicklas is rare among us, and must not be divided. Do you see?”

It sounded like a miserable way to live. Sasha’s heart broke for him. “He choose this?” He asked.

“He was chosen,” she said kindly. “If he takes his vows, then he will accept his path. We know he is touched by God, though some might think him too close to other things.”

“If he don’t?”

She smiled at him and squeezed his arm before she let go, stepping back. “He will always have a place here,” she said. “The world is unkind to the strange.”

Sasha could not stay here, watching Nicklas be watched. He couldn’t stay without purpose, without belief, without growing ever angrier.

In the end, it had not taken so long. Nicklas had sought him out one night, climbing in beside him in the room that had been his and had become Sasha’s, waking him up. He had brought with him a package, paper laid over the broad rise of Sasha’s chest. “What is?”

Nicklas sighed. “I had a Sister with fair hand draw it up. You’ll need it to leave Rome. It says you’re free. Keep it safe.”

“Nicky—”

“Don’t come back,” Nicklas had asked him, forehead warm against Sasha’s temple in Nicklas’ narrow, unwanted bed. He’d smelled like earth and sweat and always a little bit like honey.

“Promise you leave one day, too,” Sasha had asked in return, knowing at any moment that Nicklas would retreat to the garden, leaving Sasha to his dreams, and that would be the end.

Nicklas had kept his promise, or the one whispered into Sasha’s cheek in the dark, anyway.

-  
SEVEN  
-

Nicklas walked with purpose to the edge of the rolling hills they had camped in the shadows of, found a bush, and set it on fire.

It was wet with spring mist and took too long to catch, sending a column of dark smoke up into the sky for anyone to see.

It caught reluctantly, crackling in what Nicklas imagined was petulance at being so woken. “Any advice?” He asked it, once it had begun to truly produce a few tongues of flame. “A guiding word? A river of blood to wash out the rot? Snakes? You love snakes.”

The bush burned at him without answering. Nicklas threw the flint and spark at it, uncaring that he’d purloined them from Sasha’s things. “Is it because I turned his life?” He crouched down to stare into the flames, wishing divinity on them without much hope behind it. “Is it because you’re no more real than any other god?”

The flames died quietly, stalks too green to become a conflagration, no matter how much he wanted it.

He was watching it smoulder, sitting in the wet grass with his elbows on his knees when he felt steps behind him. “I’m done, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” he said, wondering if he should retrieve the flint.

“Is your god a fire god?” The centurion with the eagle face asked, moving to look at the remains of the shrub.

“Only sometimes,” Nicklas told him. “How bad is it?”

“You didn’t really do yourself a favour leaving camp to be honest.” He threw back his heavy cloak, resting a hand on the hilt of his blade. “Half of them think you cursed them and the other half won’t risk defending you, even the ones that are yours.”

Nicklas shook his head, eyes catching on the length of chain Holtby had brought with him, wondering where his anger was. Maybe it had disappeared into the sky with the smoke. “I don’t care. How sick is he?”

Holtby waited for Nicklas to rise before holding out the manacles, both thick eyebrows raised in what looked like caution. “You know how when he’s asleep he talks?” Nicklas did, intimately. Maybe they were only fragments, but the sound was a constant, a whole world of dreams barely contained by his body. “He hasn’t moved in hours.”

Nicklas hadn’t panicked in— the number of years evaded calculation. Panic required something to cling to, a fear that a future was disappearing, maybe, or simply fear for life, for the spark that kept bodies animate. Nicklas felt a trickle of something cold and slick slide down the back of his neck that came from nowhere, setting his heart off its rhythm. “If I let you put those on me will you take me to him?” Nicklas asked, eyeing the cuffs.

“ _Let_ me?”

Nicklas smiled at him. Holtby went pale, holding them out on two fingers. “You can do it yourself.”

-

The walk back passed in flashes; Holtby’s arm at his elbow easing him past the guards, fending off a tribune in full froth who demanded a sacrifice to appease the other gods Nicklas had trampled on, walking him through the scent of illness.

All the while Nicklas watched, and walked, and felt something roiling within him like storm clouds, a hideous loss of pressure opening a chasm of emptiness. It was senseless, dragging men to war. It was a void of life, an affront, a gaping wound held open by greed. None of them should be here, save that they were. Not even Nicklas, even though for one perilous, fleeting moment, he had almost been happy.

He had not thought to see Sasha again, nor to touch him, nor to see the marks life had carved on him that he had chosen. He had not thought to see the care in him again, that frightening generosity of spirit.

Nicklas stood in his maelstrom of silence with his hands clasped, watching Holtby clear the attendants from Sasha’s tent until it was just the three of them, Sasha pale and quiet on the mat.

Holtby tugged Nicklas forward with awkward gentleness. Then, in an instant, he faded from Nicklas’ attention. A violent stillness descended. Nicklas could not have said whether it was simply contained in his chest or whether it was exterior, but he curled to his knees under its weight, buried his hands in Sasha’s hair, and closed his eyes.

It was senseless, all of it. It was strange, and dark, and all Nicklas felt was in the palms of his hands, fire without heat, a demand he had made before from anger sweeping through him now from something else.

-  
EIGHT  
-

Sasha could not have said on pain of death how close he had come to it.

Perhaps not very; bodies were strange things, organs existing in harmony he didn’t need to understand in order to know how to appreciate. He’d healed from many things, a lifetime’s worth of small cuts and enough large wounds for several men.

He had made something of a habit of healing, yanking arrow shafts from the meat of his muscle, or simply refusing to notice the pain of a blade until the fury of battle drained from him, and he’d realise it had long since stopped bleeding.

He’d survived so well he’d almost forgotten what it felt like to wonder at it.

He’d almost forgotten the true, indescribable agony of warm fingers on clammy skin and then a sensation of burning so profound Sasha thought he really was dying, all awareness narrowed to experiencing something that was not flame but had no earthly comparison.

If it had happened once, when he still had a small, raw wound that would always mark him as owned, this was a hundred times that, pain almost beyond awareness, as though he could hear every voice of every man screaming with him, all at once.

And then the blackness passed.

There were fingers in his hair, tugging gently against his sweat-soaked scalp. Every part of him shook, a trembling so deep even his teeth chattered.

Nicklas’ lips brushed across his freezing forehead, scent of earth mingling with a heavy, metallic tang like blood after a battle. “Come back,” he murmured, fingers stilled around the curve of his skull.

-

When he woke there was a close darkness in his tent, the entrance pegged closed, heavy red canvas holding the heat of the day. Everything was washed burgundy by the diffused light, a few dust motes hanging in the air above him. He lifted an arm, reaching for them. A deep weakness suffused him, skin too tight over his bones, but the pain was gone.

“Finally,” Nicklas sighed, somewhere to his right side. “Could you let some air in?”

Sasha rolled towards him, laying on his side for a moment before he chanced rising. Nicklas was sitting with his hands out of sight behind him against the heaviest pole which supported the ceiling, tunic sliding off his left shoulder, a few curls in disarray over his face. It took a moment for Sasha to realise why he couldn’t do it himself. “What happened?”

Nicklas shrugged, eyes flicking over Sasha’s face, across his chest, his lip briefly dragged between his teeth before he answered. “I’m not sure. There was a lot of screaming. Your centurion didn’t want to lose track of me when he went to see.”

“You let him?”

Nicklas let out a long breath. “It seemed easiest.”

There was a universe unspoken in that statement, but Sasha felt as weak as a puppy, too close to waking to examine it. “What did you do?”

“Would you believe me if I said I don’t know?”

Sasha wanted to sit up but couldn’t quite do it. He wanted— he wanted to hold him, to pull Nicklas against him and bury his face in the obscene curve of his neck, to feel his lips against his skin. He didn’t want to let the air in, in case he was dreaming.

Nicklas tipped his chin back, head resting against the wood and baring his long, pale throat.

Sasha pushed himself up. Nicklas couldn’t come to him; he would go there. He could cross this scant distance. It was hardly the Rubicon. Sasha’s clothes stuck to him unpleasantly and his mouth was dry. He ached in places he hadn’t known an ache could settle, but it felt distant when he rolled to his knees, strength coming back as he stood. The tent wavered in his vision, then righted itself as his blood settled.

Nicklas looked up at him, eyes glinting suspiciously bright.

It took no strength at all to sink to his knees in front of him, less still to cup Nicklas’ soft cheeks in his palms. Nicklas made a sound like a sigh, a heady outrush of breath that Sasha felt all through his body. “You can go,” Sasha told him. “I find Holtby and you can go. Anywhere you want. I tell everyone you disappear, that you turn into a tree like a dryad, you just—“

It was too easy to be close to him, too strange and quiet without the bees. It was too shocking when Nicklas leaned in to brush his lips against Sasha’s, dry and bitten and perfect.

Gods help him, Sasha could only kiss him back. He buried his hands in his hair and the choked sob Nicklas let out might have come from either of them, from both of them together, Sasha nearly crumpling from the weight in his chest. He kissed him until there was no air left in his lungs, then once more, brushing the corner of his warm mouth. “Your vows,” he managed, stroking across the back of Nicklas’ neck, tangled against him sideways, Nicklas’ face too close to see.

“Take me to Rome,” Nicklas said. “If I have to face God it might as well be there.”

Sasha ran his hands down Nicklas’ sides, over the hidden curve of his hips. He was so solid, so achingly real that Sasha wondered how he managed to contain everything he was in just one this one body, built of skin and muscle just like Sasha was. Nicklas’ breath shuddered out, and maybe Nicklas wanted just as Sasha did. Maybe if they had done this as younger men Nicklas would have been cast out and freed, too. “Is it still— are we sin if you don’t touch me?”

Nicklas leaned back, just enough for Sasha to remember the rest.

Sasha rested on his knees, too close still, close enough to hear the rasp of iron, out of sight behind them.

“I would,” Nicklas told him. “I would touch you.”

Sasha had never felt like this; it wasn’t his nature to believe a problem was unsolvable, that anything could be so tangled as they were. He hadn’t known that to love something was to release it. Maybe Nicklas had.

Sasha tucked the loose strands of his hair behind his small ears for him, resting both hands against the sides of his neck for a moment before he rose, just to feel the blood moving beneath the skin.

He would take him to Rome, if that was where his god was; if it had any mercy for its mortals maybe it would even recognize which ones weren’t meant to belong to it.

“I’ll be back,” he promised, forcing himself to stand.

“I know,” Nicklas said. “Leave it open.”

-  
NINE  
-

Sasha left the tent open, pulled back a fraction to let the air move.

Nicklas still felt too hot, a heat under his skin that pooled in all his hollow places; the pit of his stomach and the depths of his chest. A breeze had risen, bringing with it sound. Beyond the tent the camp had begun to stir, an inrush of voices, footsteps out of sight.

He tested the give of the chain and found it stubbornly short. His shoulders had begun to ache, pulled tight with how desperately he had wanted to put his hands on Sasha, warm and alive and ruined.

Nicklas had done many things he’d lived to regret. It was the condition of humanity to see the past as a map with turns marked badly sometimes, small pettiness and larger selfishness snaking here and there, leading down roads often too well-traveled.

Nicklas could not bring himself to regret ruining Sasha, nor dragging him off his path again. Nicklas was selfish. He had no idea what had happened beyond this tent, and could not force himself to care. He had done something awful, and it had set his body alight in a way no faith ever had, nor reassurance of divine, invisible love. He had forced the life back into Sasha because he wanted him. He wanted him in a way he’d sworn to deny, a kind of claiming that declared Sasha his beyond the reach of any gods, an angry, petty human thing.

He closed his eyes against it, hoping to blink away the sting in them. A curious, furred body brushed against his cheek, and then another, investigating the dampness there. They made such a small sound, these little creatures, on their own. A tiny displacement of air that was barely a hum, but of all the things Nicklas could and could not hear this was the most comforting. He had never laid claim to them but they came back to him anyway, always. He did not think they loved him, but they gave him their company without condition, an animal gift without common language. It sometimes felt the same.

Nonetheless, he wished he could brush them from his face, their prickled touch beginning to itch.

He could not have said how much time had passed, but the heavy fabric of the tent kept the heat close and muffling, noise at a distance refusing to truly resolve into words. Someone might have been shouting. Everything was reduced to the universe of his body; the trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades, the skin-warmed metal growing slick against his wrists, the heavy numbness of staying seated for too long, muscles used to movement protesting this unrestful stillness. Beneath it all, the limitless want, the ache of being untouched not even his own hands could ease and no amount of pleading could erase.

Nicklas had hoped desperately that Sasha would touch him, and then he had, palms against his skin only driving the hunger deeper. Nicklas thunked his head back against the wooden pillar, restlessness as inescapable as the cursed tent. He could pull it down, maybe, if he stood for leverage. He could bring the whole temporary edifice out of order, but then he would still be under it. He would still be burning.

Unbidden, he thought of Andre. It wasn’t funny, but Nicklas could only breathe a quiet laugh to himself. He really was a terrible priest.

-

He was still trying to ease down his rising hysteria when Holtby slipped beneath the arch made by the half-opened entrance, moving on silent feet to crouch down in front of him. He was streaked with spring mud, cloak discarded, though his sword was still at his hip. “What’s so funny?” He asked, urgently. “Did you hear?”

Nicklas shook his head, still wordless.

Holtby scrubbed a broad hand over his face. “I didn’t leave Britannia for this shit,” he muttered, searching at his belt for the heavy key. “Just—” he paused, finding it, but catching Nicklas’ eyes for long enough that Nicklas thought maybe there was something a little bit like fear in them. “How did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Heal them all.”

Oh. _Oh._ “God is—”

“You know what?” Holtby glared at him. “Never mind. Don’t talk.” His movements were rushed, but his hands were gentle on Nicklas’ wrists, almost as though he was afraid to hurt him. The release of the stiff lock was an unfathomable relief, even if it took a moment before he could lift his arms. “Sorry,” Holtby muttered, with more penitence than Nicklas deserved. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

Nicklas had long since forgiven him. Even so, the new movements were painful enough to prevent him from saying it. Holtby helped him stand, brusquely setting him on his feet and sweeping through the tent, bundling things into a roll: some of Sasha’s papers, a spare cloak, and then, finally, he stopped in front of the stand bearing Sasha’s armour. “Here,” Holtby said, turning back to Nicklas and shoving the bundle into his arms. “Hold this.”

Nicklas, still reeling, took the weight. Holtby lifted the sword and chest plates, leaving the rest.

“All of them?” Nicklas asked, watching as his eyes swept over the tent again, resting nowhere, especially not Nicklas. “Really?”

“You need to go,” Holtby said, “He’s waiting for you. If anyone— I don’t know what you are, but if you don’t want to be staked out for the crows you need to leave.”

Nicklas supposed that made sense, in a way; there was little men feared more than the unknown, though all of them existed in a state of mystery without seeing it. Anything might happen, if the future didn’t truly exist yet. He was not a stranger to mobs driven by confusion.

He glanced at the chain, laying forgotten by his feet. “Those too,” he said, tilting his chin. “In case he needs them.” Holtby’s frown creased all the way into his tawny beard. “I won’t have him taken for desertion,” Nicklas told him, thankful for the dimness of the tent.

Holtby bent to collect them, avoiding Nicklas’ eyes. “Come on. You need to be far away before dark.” The last thing he did was drape one of Sasha’s heavy red cloaks around him, fastening it at the shoulder, despite backing away as quickly as possible, eyeing the bees suspiciously. “Can you pretend to be a soldier?”

“Can you pretend to be a fish?” Nicklas asked, straightening his shoulders anyway.

“Close enough,” Holtby sighed, leading the way out.

Nicklas had seen someone kick a beehive once, when he was younger. It had set the swarm to an affronted exodus, a maelstrom with purpose.

The camp outside was a mess, neat lines swarming with men and officers trying to keep order, something explosive building beneath the fracturing discipline that even Nicklas could sense, skirting around the edges at Holtby’s muddied heels.

He had done this, undone the stitching of the legion, whether he had done it with intent or not. Would it have been better to leave them to the sickness? He couldn't bring himself to believe it. The men would live, and think, and maybe Nicklas’ crimes would be measured against that, if nothing else.

-

Sasha was waiting for them at the foot of the hills with two horses and a pack, gently checking their hooves for stones.

The evening sun glinted off the silver of his hair, catching on the burnished bronze of his armour as Holtby handed it to him.

Nicklas just watched, committing to memory the sight of him alive, the years of age on his face, the great, easy size of him, his body taking up space as though the vitality in him had only grown with time.

Nicklas watched, and wanted, and refused to regret.

“You in charge now,” Sasha told Holtby, clapping him on the shoulder. “Remember what I tell you.”

“What about the tribunes?”

“If you very lucky maybe they get torn to pieces,” Sasha said. “Otherwise, you listen and nod, then you do what you think is best.”

“How long will you be?”

“Two days to Rome, I think, if the road is good,” Sasha said, glancing at Nicklas, who could not look away. “I’ll send words.”

Holtby nodded, and then he was gone, striding back along the new path they had trampled through the tall spring bushes.

Sasha smiled at him, a benediction Nicklas did not deserve, missing tooth and crooked nose made wonderful by the awful warmth in his eyes. He handed Nicklas the reins of the second horse, exchanging them for the roll of his things Holtby had burdened him with. He laid a hand against Nicklas’ cheek, thumb brushing gently under the curve of his eye. “Ready?”

Nicklas nodded, unable to speak.

“You look good in red,” Sasha said quietly. “Look like the Emperor.”

Nicklas laughed, sound thick and heavy in his throat. “The Emperor wears purple.”

“Maybe you look better,” Sasha said, releasing him to mount his horse.

-  
TEN  
-

When night had truly fallen, darkness covering even the strange, blue twilight which erased distance and made even the curve of the hills seem like something he could reach out and touch, Sasha drew them to a halt. Here was as good a place as any, a small valley tucked off the road, trees thickening as they moved downhill. Sasha followed the sound of water, the scent of it somehow unmistakable.

Nicklas followed without a sound. He had not offered any for hours now. A deep silence seeming to suffuse him. Maybe it was catching. The exaltation Sasha usually felt at a faster pace, a day or two away from the legion was absent. It had been replaced with something else, a pregnant kind of patience Sasha had no word for. Nicklas halted beside him as Sasha chose their campsite, a small hollow between two large trees in bud. They were very close to a stream, though Sasha could not have said how he knew.

Sasha’s flint and striker weren’t in the pack so they had no fire, but it wasn’t such a cold night that they would suffer. He made camp quickly, seeing to the horses while Nicklas spread the bedding, and soon enough they came together again. Sasha found himself as wordless as he’d been once, almost asleep pressed against Nicklas’ solid side, one hand spread over him to feel the rise and fall of his ribs.

Sasha rarely remembered his dreams, but as he sank into sleep he dreamt himself somewhere almost like this, finding it strange to be in the sun when the last part of him which was awake knew it to be full night.

-

Nicklas rose long before dawn, slipping out from beneath Sasha’s arm.

At first Sasha thought it might be just the ordinary needs of the body, but then he didn’t come back, leaving a cold space where his back had been warming Sasha’s chest.

There was half a moon to see by, enough that when Sasha stirred himself he could pick him out in the trees without too much trouble.

Nicklas was standing with his hands open and his eyes closed, face tipped up to the stars. He was still wearing the red cloak, heavy weave of it flung back over one shoulder. He looked angry, but he often did.

“You having argument?” Sasha asked him, voice rough from sleep.

Nicklas opened his eyes, green of them like glass, reflective for a instant. Sasha wondered what part of him was closest to the surface. “You need at least two for an argument,” Nicklas said, lowering his palms.

Sasha wanted to approach him, but if he did he would want to close the distance completely, to wrap him in his arms and keep him there. Nicklas was looking past him, eyes scanning here and there, looking for—

“Where are your bees?”

Nicklas fixed his eyes on him, a strange, lost look in them Sasha had never seen before. “I don’t know.”

Sasha hadn’t thought much about grief in the moments since he’d dipped his feet in the great marsh of the underworld. He felt too filled with life, too much like he was imbued with some new kind of spirit.

Grief seeped through him now, dripping into every crack and corner. He closed the distance between them, drawing Nicklas close again. Nicklas shuddered, reaching up to clutch at his back, grip so tight Sasha thought his ribs might crack. “They come back,” he said. “They always come back, yes?”

Nicklas said nothing, breathing into Sasha’s chest.

When they had been boys Sasha had thought of him as wild, like the spirits that lived in the bleached birch forests of his birth who drew travellers in towards them by showing their backs, calling over their bark-white shoulders.

He had thought of him as unearthly in his own right, until he had seen the human in him, the pettiness and the mocking imitation of his teachers and the deep sadness Sasha had been furious nobody else seemed to notice.

Sasha tangled a hand in his hair, feeling the fragile curve of bone beneath skin. “Maybe they don’t want to go to Rome,” he offered. “Maybe they’re thinking you leave now and forget it, go make honey, give marriage, tell people your god loves them.”

“I can’t,” Nicklas said, voice small and wet.

Sasha had always known. It was impossible that a god who asked for so much abstinence could possibly lay a claim on the humming, buzzing life that Nicklas exuded. “Why we going to Rome?”

Sasha knew the surface of it; protect his little acts of anarchy, drive a thorn into the side of anything which would take life senselessly. Days ago, Sasha might even have argued against him before tribunal, knowing the Church would protect him with their own forms of discipline. Sasha could have returned him into their arms within the stalemate it was slowly carving out with Imperial authority. He hadn’t truly thought Nicklas was in mortal danger.

“Do you think it was a miracle?” Nicklas asked him.

Sasha didn’t. He thought it was inexplicable, a warping of reality that defied explanation, but he’d heard about the miracles in the monastery, and he didn’t think it was anything their god would have worked. It seemed to choose vessels empty of want and empty of all spirit save itself, or those who strove towards it. “Do you?”

Nicklas drew back, scrubbing at his face with Sasha’s cloak.

He didn’t answer, but Sasha hadn’t expected him to. Sasha— Sasha wanted to touch him all the time, to hold him close in a way he had always been denied, set apart by things he had little control over.

Sasha could well see how awe turned to fear, two faces of the same thing. It had still seemed like cruelty not to allow the human heart in him to flourish along with that which the bees were drawn to. “When I join the auxiliaries,” Sasha told him, watching the gentle curve of his jaw, the way his lips parted over his teeth as he breathed, “I think how much you’d hate it. Always so much yelling, go here, stand there, march like this. Then I think maybe you already know what it’s like, a little.”

Nicklas looked up at him, swollen and disarrayed. “Are you still serving the Empire?”

“I shall faithfully execute all that the Emperor commands, I shall never desert the service and I shall not seek to avoid death for Rome,” Sasha recited, words embedded deep by repetition. “None broken yet.”

“Service in peace, chastity and obedience to God,” Nicklas said, simply. “And I want to break them all.”

Sasha loved him. He had thought maybe it would fade with time, and it had, distance and obligation leaving him in the past, a bright streak of strangeness. But the world was so much wilder than anyone’s attempts to order it could account for, and sometimes ancient things pulled themselves forward, anchored in memory. Sometimes that which was released came back, just as a turn of the seasons. “You not very obedient,” Sasha told him.

“God help me,” Nicklas whispered, a hint of a rueful smile pulling at his lips, crooked and small. “I did try.”

Sasha would not have kissed him, had Nicklas not drawn him down towards him with ungentle hands. Sasha had never sworn to love Rome. Instead, maybe, he had a room in his heart that was open to the air, reserved for Nicklas who had never once asked him to keep it.

Sasha took him by the wrists, gently enough that he could feel the faint movements of his sinews, aching at the rasp of Nicklas’ teeth at his lower lip. “You breaking one tonight?”

Nicklas leaned his forehead against Sasha’s, his breath very loud in the small space between them. “Maybe if you keep my hands,” he whispered, “I won’t have to decide.”

Of all the things Sasha had refused himself in his life, no matter how few they were, how significant, choosing to leave Nicklas’ last vow intact was the hardest. He would not break it for him.

-

The first sight of Rome was smoke, the rising fires from every craftsman and baker and charnel sending thin tendrils into the air, little banners streaming up to the sky from every hill.

Sasha knew well how filthy its lower quarters were, how populated, how thick with everything imaginable humanity could produce, but nevertheless it had never failed to awe by its scale.

The road would be busy when they rejoined it. Sasha would have to out his armour back on, to bear the mark of his legion, to ride through the southern gate as a citizen.

“We’ll be there by nightfall,” Nicklas supplied, when Sasha looked up to gauge the angle of the sun. “Sooner, maybe, if we take the road.”

“You ever think you’ll come back?”

“I hoped I would never have to,” Nicklas said, guiding his horse awkwardly with his knees while he removed Sasha’s red cloak, rolling it carefully to lay it across his saddle. The animals had been uneasy since the departure of the bees, though the two species had never, in Sasha’s experience, been brotherly. “I should have known better.”

“Better than marrying everyone you know?”

Nicklas carefully didn’t laugh as he handed Sasha his cloak back. “Better than to take vows I couldn’t keep.”

Sasha hadn’t asked what Nicklas expected to happen within the city walls. Sasha had his own expectations, but if Sasha believed in anything it was that nothing was truly too strange to be real, and that nothing on the mortal plane would give Nicklas back only to take him away again. “What you’ll tell them?”

“The truth,” Nicklas said. “And you?”

“The same,” Sasha said. “You save too many to execute for twenty more.”

Nicklas didn’t reply, instead halting to rummage inside the bundle he’d been carrying. He handed Sasha something heavy and hard beneath its fabric wrapping, the sound it made horribly familiar. Sasha almost dropped it, repulsed. “No.”

“Are your vows less important than mine?” Nicklas asked him, setting his hands back on his reins. “Is your word enough, travelling alone?”

Sasha was not a deserter. The thought of it prickled. If he— his terms were his, and his service only a few more years.

“You know I’m right,” Nicklas said, urging his horse forward. “Do it when we get to the road, please. They’re very uncomfortable.”

-

Passing through the gate was a blur. Runners were sent to up the hills, clerks stirred to action, and through all of it Sasha could think of nothing but turning around and leaving again. He could turn from the shining city, bathed in sunlight and civilisation, take Nicklas by the slack chain between his unresisting wrists and drag him away.

Sasha felt his doom pass over him with the great arch of the guard post, sealed with the small smile Nicklas aimed at him when nobody else was looking.

-  
ELEVEN  
-

Even as a very small child in the depths of winter Nicklas had railed at being enclosed in small spaces. He thought maybe he had been born somewhere where winter was eternal, for that was his memory of it; cold and a thick blanket of snow, and the horror of doors kept closed by it. Low ceilings, always seeming about to cave in, the tightness in his chest that came from being away from the air.

He had not thought of it in many years, but the cell he had been placed in had every mark of winter Nicklas remembered. A cold, damp smell of water creeping in, stone all around and nothing to let the light through. Maybe as a child his home would have had a place for the smoke to go at least, but here nobody expected him to start a fire.

There must have been a summer, he told himself. There must have been a time of growth and planting and harvest, because there were bees, and honey, and their small and welcome company no matter the season, no matter how few.

He missed them, a pain like a wound between his ribs every time he noticed their absence.

He turned his mind elsewhere, knowing this to be temporary, a measure only of preparation. The Church would not let him be left here as so much bait for the lions, nor would the legions waste time hearing Sasha. In the end, Nicklas had come here to face them both, and if he must do it alone then so be it.

He had little memory of the language he had been born to, or of the name he'd had before this one, but unbidden a phrase came back, a fragment jagged on his tongue. Thinking of Sasha he spoke it anyway. “Unharmed go forth and unharmed return,” he whispered, testing it, wondering where it had come from. “Unharmed safe home.”

It felt truer than any blessing he had given as a priest, though he was still bound by what he had not yet broken.

-

Nicklas could not sleep enclosed, but he had managed to soothe himself to some facsimile of rest when the great grind of hinges brought him back to his body.

He had not seen the full robes of his order for many years. The deep black was strange after so long in a world full of natural colour, a stark void that gave the priests they had sent for him an air of disconnection, seeming to be only hands and faces as his eyes adjusted to the light.

He didn’t recognize them, though they seemed to know him. “Father Nicklas?” The taller of them was a Sister, voice smooth and even, damped by the heavy stones.

“I am,” he said, rising to meet them. He didn’t ask their names, even as the Brother clasped his hands over Nicklas’ and began to pray, words asking God for direction and mercy Nicklas knew would not be heeded, not on Nicklas’ behalf.

At once, all the grime of travel and the faded grey of his plain robes felt right. He would face them as he was, with nothing but himself.

He let himself be led out into the light, not bothering to stifle his laugh when the Brother turned back to his Sister to hiss “I thought you said there would be bees!”

-

He had not expected the military tribunal to have so many men in red, nor for it to be so loud.

Nicklas was placed in the middle of the floor, marble steps rising on all sides so he had the impression of being in the grand arena, or a fish at the bottom of a barrel in the marketplace, hearing voices through the water haggling over his weight.

Nicklas heard every accusation, a young man with decorated shoulders reading from a tablet, recounting his arrest, his time with the legion, but Nicklas could only look at Sasha.

He had shaved, bathed. He looked like a Roman, standing among the representatives of his legion, insignia matching, his wide pale eyes fixed on Nicklas.

He had not spoken. He had not been asked to speak, his story falling from other mouths, no doubt scrupulously recorded for posterity: The marriage and Nicklas’ arrest. The plague and its erasure. The balance of men’s lives, the twenty Nicklas had given a protective sacrament to, and those he had saved, most of whom he hadn’t even seen. Recited above the interjections, even Nicklas thought it could hardly be true, save that Sasha was there, and he was alive.

“—It’s not possible!” One of the elder men shouted, going a colour Nicklas had never seen on the living. “It is simply—“

“It is a miracle.” The Mother of his order spoke quietly, yet somehow the sound travelled, cutting a path of silence through the accusations. Nicklas had seen her last when she was still a Sister, and first in a grove in the forest somewhere far to the North, a place just beginning to hear of her god.

She had always had a warm hand for him, a deep faith in what he could be, if he would only accept God’s gifts, as though Nicklas had not seen their like in nature. “It wasn’t,” Nicklas said, barely aware of the hush he had provoked, a high rushing sound in his ears. “It wasn’t a miracle. I only wanted to save one.”

There was another outburst, another rush of voices. Some claimed Nicklas was not human, sent by other gods from other faiths. Some claimed he was lying, that the Church was sending traitors to Rome out into the Empire to stir dissent. Nicklas heard them all and ignored them.

A tremendous sense of peace had begun to settle over him. Nicklas was not a creature of god as she had wanted him to be, and to keep trying to live beneath the vows he had taken was impossible. He would die, or he would be pardoned, but he could not do it as a priest. He wished he could explain to Sasha, but to find the words felt impossible.

He turned his back on the Romans, looking at the spread of his order, and the heads of the others who had come to watch and safeguard the name of God. The tall man in the strange hat who presided over the strictest of them, men austere and silent, and the stooped and aged devotees who grew their hair and believed in poverty. Then, he looked to his own kind, the ones who believed in peace and the blessings of healing.

Nicklas did not remember his own mother, so perhaps she was the closest thing he had, and the one to whom he could ask for this last understanding. “I offered a marriage to keep men from war, but I’ve performed no miracles. I’ve done nothing for God alone,” he told her, confessing in a rush. “I have not been a servant. I have never been obedient. I have only kept my vows in name. I do not believe in them.”

She was still very beautiful, in her austere way; her dark hair was thick and streaked with white, the dark brown a colour Nicklas had never seen before as a boy. When she faced him Nicklas found he welcomed her. “And the last?” She asked. “You have kept it?”

“I wish it lifted,” he confessed.

All sound beyond them ceased, or Nicklas ceased to hear it.

“Will you repent?”

He had so many questions for her, decades worth, sunken deep into him unanswered: why would a god who had chosen to be human ask their followers to deny the riches of a human life? Why should they forgo the possibilities of love and warmth all around and see the divine only in the distance? Why was it so forbidden to _want_ when wanting brought him forward with it, when he found himself balanced, precarious, on the very edge of a calamitous fear, and still he was ready to leap?

He held his hands out to her. She clasped them, her fingers smooth and familiar, cool on the angry skin beginning to redden beneath the cuffs. He smiled at her, certain with all of his heart. “I will not.”

She let out a sigh, warm brown eyes so much older than he remembered them. “He is not ours,” she said, with wonderful, awful finality. She announced it to all, but it was Nicklas she was looking at when she released his hands, placed a palm over his forehead and pronounced him excommunicated, making him a heretic at last.

-  
TWELVE  
-

Sasha felt the words wash over him, the clamour of debate becoming noise, akin to blood rushing through his ears during a battle, eclipsing everything save the wild pounding of his heart.

Nicklas looked at him as the tribunal decided his fate, fine lips lifted at one corner, a silent joke between them.

A dam within Sasha which had been leaking for weeks gave a great crack and spilled over, drowning what little faith he had kept back for justice.

-

Sasha kept a small house on a hill far from the monastery which had been his second place in Rome, after the cells. He employed a boy to feed the hounds and keep the courtyard swept, and left the rest to Kuzya, who was better at it.

When he crossed his own threshold after months away he was greeted by the simple enthusiasm of animals and the shy words of their keeper and knew he had surprised them. Good. He would not be home long.

Sasha took a moment to look, crouched on the warm, ochre tiles with his hands occupied in affection. The little fountain in the atrium offered fresh water, and the air was cool in the shade. The porch had small seats, low enough to rest on, and beyond some small rooms Sasha had rarely filled. He thought Nicklas would have liked it for its openness, and hated it for its high walls.

He pushed himself to his feet and set off to his study, containing what papers and records he kept. It took him a moment to begin once he had bent over his desk with a stylus, too accustomed to dictating.

In the end he opted for simplicity, one sheaf of orders left on the wood for the dispersal of his assets, and another which he rolled tightly and slipped under his belt.

The rest he bundled; a writ of manumission that did not belong to him and one that did, and the few curios he found he could not leave behind.

He moved through his home taking only what he might need to move quickly and far.

When he reached the courtyard again he was whistling between his teeth, seized with purpose, and left for a final time to find a reliable messenger to carry a letter, enough coin weighing his hand that not even the most exclusive could refuse the distance.

-

Sasha had almost convinced himself to love Rome, against all the odds of his arrival in it. He had almost learned to be a Roman. It had felt earned, a place he had carved for himself, that he’d proved himself for.

Some things he would miss.

He walked right past the guards at the prison, who saw his rank and made way immediately, saluting as they passed him through the gates and into the oppressive darkness.

It would never be so easy again, though Sasha felt it was a fair price.

The guard on duty was settled in his chair with the air of a man so used to occupying one position that his body had begun to take the form of it. He looked up at Sasha and took his time rising, levering himself up by the arms before offering him a lazy salute. Sasha smiled at him anyway. “I’m here for the priest,” he announced, because he was.

The guard squinted at him. “He’s to be executed in the morning.”

“He’s to be taken to the temple of Janus,” Sasha lied, “make sure is a good death for better gods.”

“I’ll send word to the Praetor you’ve taken him.” He produced a stylus and a tablet, bending over the wax as a challenge.

“Do,” Sasha said, calling his bluff.

The guard looked him up and down, eyes seeming to catch on the small nicks of battle nobody had ever been able to polish from his breastplate, and which Sasha had never seen reason to have beaten out. Every one was a warning and a piece of luck.

He plunged the stylus into the wax, marking Sasha’s rank and legion.

Sasha had not expected to return, so it didn’t matter.

Sasha made a show of being unhurried, heart beginning to pound in his chest. “Odd one, this,” the guard said. “I heard he killed twenty men and cursed the Emperor, and those one-god people wouldn’t condemn him themselves. Should all be sent to the arena if you ask me.” He glanced at Sasha. “Couldn’t they send an optio, Praefectus?”

Sasha’s patience was wearing very thin, but he grinned anyway. “I always like temple of Janus,” he said. “They very good-looking.”

Sasha got a laugh for that, which was just as well, because as soon as he removed the keys from their hiding place Sasha choked him unconscious. So much for subtlety, but to hell with it. Subtlety was for politicians.

-  
THIRTEEN  
-

Nicklas had not slept in days, though he supposed it didn’t matter. Bodies needed sleep to live and he would very likely not be doing that for much longer. The thought felt like it should have come attached to some kind of feeling, perhaps grief, or anger, but all Nicklas felt was something that was a distant cousin to mirth.

As a boy, he had almost been given as sacrifice for what he was. As a man it would finally happen, though to be executed for crimes against Rome was only to be sacrificed to the most human of spirits.

He was still laughing, pressed with his back to the damp stone facing the door when it ground open.

“What’s so funny?” Sasha asked him, resolving from the blur of the light behind him. “You about to die, you laughing?”

“Are you taking me to my death now? I thought you’d have better things to do.” The sight of him was wonderful, surreal and unexpected, and almost as much as a shock as it had been weeks ago, when Sasha had walked up to him in the middle of a dark night as though he had been gone moments instead of years.

Nicklas had truly hoped he’d been sent back to his legion, to his men and horses and wars. Nicklas had known — thought, believed — that he was also saving him, in asking Sasha to take him to Rome. Let God and man release him at once, and let both move on.

Nicklas had been prepared to accept that what he wanted would doom him. He didn’t think it was fair to ask the same of Sasha, who he had not made complicit in breaking his vows no matter how much he’d wanted to.

Sasha made a noise low in his throat, and the part of Nicklas which loved him too deeply to want to see him here sent a pain through him like a thin blade, slicing open the thick fog of peace he had cloaked himself in. “Hurry,” Sasha told him, crossing the threshold to pull him up. “I don’t use my sword yet, maybe we get away without.”

“You are a fool,” Nicklas meant every word, filled with a hideous kind of joy at his touch. “What if they catch you?”

“They won’t,” Sasha told him with supreme arrogance, seizing him by the chain between his wrists and dragging him from the cell, stopping only to strike off the cuffs with a look of hatred Nicklas did not have time to cherish.

-

Perhaps it said more about Rome than either of them that it took almost too little time to make their way through the city towards the southern gate, or that Sasha’s brazen walk attracted so little alarm.

The early evening was fading to night and every moment of it was a precious reprieve, air all around dank and heavy with city life and fresher than any Nicklas had expected to breathe again.

Everything seemed fragile, seen through a haze of exhaustion and euphoria; the people ignoring them, the narrow streets branching away from the wide roads, buildings almost seeming to reach towards each other, bending in to block the sky.

Nicklas could imagine Sasha living here. He could, if he tried, imagine a possible branch of their infinite futures, one in which Nicklas had repented and gone back to the monastery, and in which Sasha had retired from his service with honour. They might have met, sometimes, to walk, or to pass each other on the steps. Maybe Sasha would have had children, a big household of misfits to keep him company. Maybe Nicklas would have allowed himself to feel guilty for wanting him. Maybe Nicklas would have accepted what it truly meant to be a priest of the Church and learned to be happy.

Nicklas halted Sasha in sight of the gate with a brush of his fingers across the crease of his elbow, drawing strength from the way Sasha reached out to steady him, drawing them into a slice of shadow beneath an awning abandoned for the night. “What now?”

Sasha brushed his thumb across the bottom of Nicklas’ cracked lip, a smile creasing the corners of his wide eyes, spreading lines beside them. “Now we run,” Sasha said, “unless you have better idea.”

Nicklas had never felt filthier, though it was only a few days of enclosure which clung to him. He was chafed and exhausted, and the thought of moving faster seemed impossible. “I might,” he said, reaching for Sasha’s cloak. “Have they raised the alarm?”

Sasha glanced at the guard post, biting his lip. “Soon, I think. Maybe we lucky.”

“So we don’t have to run,” Nicklas said. “We just give them something else to report.”

Silently, Sasha began to work at the buckles of his armour, leaving it leaning against the shadowed wall behind them for someone else to find.

-

Whatever else they had done, passing under the gates of Rome as lovers felt like the strangest.

A legionary without a legion and a tall, pale man in faded robes still blinking from too much time in darkness would be strange.

Almost as strange to Nicklas as two people so close as to be indifferent to the rest of the world, but Sasha’s body bent over him, shielding him, lips pressed to the shell of his ear as he waved off the enquiries of bored sentries who had seen it a thousand times. How strange for it to be mundane, not to run, just to walk next to each other.

Their faces turned into each other, and Nicklas wondered what might have been had they done this fifteen years ago, a possible circle closing itself, resolving into hysterical relief as soon as they met the courier waiting for Sasha on the road with a horse.

Nicklas fell asleep against Sasha’s broad back, hands clasped around the solidity of his thick waist. Sasha’s hand rested over Nicklas’ interlaced fingers, and Nicklas thought even if he never touched him any other way, this would be enough, wordless reassurance that even if he slept he wouldn’t fall.

-

He woke to a halt, to greenery and rushing water.

He had no notion of how far they were from Rome, but it didn’t matter. Sasha helped him down, setting him on his feet by a deep pool, water black and calm, stirred gently by a slow current.

All around the trees were thick, mossed where they were near the water. “How did you find this?”

Sasha shrugged, pulling the saddle from the horse with ease and setting it against the nearest stone. It was a poor place to camp, too damp and with hardly anywhere flat enough to sleep, but it was hidden, no path in plain view. “I hear the water.”

Nicklas bent to look into it, kneeling by the edge. His own reflection wavered back at him, pale and strange. He touched a hand to it, fingers breaking the surface just as Sasha took him by the shoulders and pushed him in, robes and all, a great shock of cold robbing him of air.

Nicklas surfaced to splutter, lungs burning, but Sasha leapt in after him, stripped to the waist and pale in the faint sun, and splashed a great handful of water at him, disappearing behind it.

He broke the surface again with a shake of his head, flinging water from his hair, brushing it from his eyes while Nicklas stood in the waist-deep pool and shivered. The water was so cold he felt it might reach his bones, seeping past his skin and muscle. Sasha hardly seemed to notice it, but once the wake had settled around him he looked at Nicklas again, settling with his hands open, approaching him slowly.

“Let me?” Sasha asked, pulling at the sodden weight of Nicklas’ clothes.

His hands were cold, everything was cold, but the weight lifting from Nicklas’ shoulders was more than just the rough weave of a tunic he had spent too long in. Nicklas felt undone, stripped of anything but himself, the raw, strange core which he had only glimpsed in passing.

Sasha’s hands on his bare skin, the press of his chest as he gathered the mass of Nicklas’ wet hair with appalling gentleness and smoothed it back, the way he was present in every gesture; it was too much to bear.

Nicklas seized him by the shoulders, drawing him as close as he could, kissing him with a sodden laugh before he pushed him over, watching him flail backwards into the water. Nicklas felt himself begin to warm when Sasha rose, cold becoming numbness and then heat.

Sasha’s hands circled Nicklas’ wrists, loose grip a very faint pain as he frowned at the bruised skin, squeezing once and letting go to head for the bank.

Nicklas submerged himself once more, blocking out the world above the waterline for a brief instant, held in the weightless water, marvelling at how badly he wanted to breathe. He caught his feet under him on the smooth stones of the stream bed and pushed himself up, following Sasha to the shore.

There would be a time to talk but it wasn’t now. He wanted to let the water sweep off the last of Rome. He wanted to touch Sasha with abandon, to feel the density of his skin and the rasp of his teeth. Nicklas wanted to know how to do this. He had asked to be released from his vows, but the rest was new, a possibility he had known better than to hope for. He could have gone to his death freed of the obligation of guilt and regret for the depth of his desire, but to have it? To be here stripped bare and unbound? Nicklas had no words for it, simple longing eclipsing every other thought.

Sasha had his back to him, bent over to search through their supplies. Nicklas stroked a finger down his spine, allowing himself to admire it.

Sasha twitched. “Ah. Cold.”

“You threw me in.”

Sasha looked over his shoulder, half-turned. “You smell yourself, you forgive me.”

Nicklas didn’t for an instant think that was the real reason. “I forgive you.”

Sasha drew him down, turning his back to the nearest tree so that Nicklas could lean into him, trunk wide enough to support them both, side by side. Sasha had oil, a small bottle open and the sheen of it covering his fingers, traces of it on his chest, in the wet grey of his hair, pushed back from his broad forehead. Sasha reached for him and Nicklas let him, watching him press his thumbs over his wrists, easing it into the scrapes.

It hurt. It felt nothing like pain.

It had been some kind of luck, Nicklas decided, that the first time he had kissed him he couldn’t touch him, because he wanted to with such ferocity that every last trace of the cold was gone in an instant. In its place was an unfettered desire that had no oath left to subsume it.

Nicklas turned Sasha’s face towards him, two fingers laid along the side of his jaw. Every time, Nicklas had fallen, had crashed in towards him, had felt Sasha rush up to meet him. This time, Nicklas asked.

-

He had no experience of this, of Sasha’s body over him, pressing his back to a hastily spread cloak, of the great expanse of him easy beneath his fingertips. There was a rock under his left hip, dampness seeping through the fabric; Sasha kissed a line up the edge of his shoulder with just the faintest hint of teeth, irreverent and perfect, and Nicklas forgot everything beyond the need building in the base of his spine.

Nicklas wanted to start everywhere, to press himself against curve and plane. Nicklas had seen Sasha’s body: the first time he had ever seen him he had seen all of him. Since then he’d seen him muddied from travel, shedding the layers of his armour. He’d seen him half hard in the mornings, slept next to him and seen him twisted in his clothes from his dreams.

Nicklas wasn’t prepared for this, the reality of Sasha’s warm skin, his gentle hands, the unfamiliar look in his eyes, watching Nicklas as though he was something he’d never seen before.

The nearness of him had not grown ordinary in their weeks of travel. Nicklas raised a hand and had no idea where to touch first, freed of both iron and the almost lifelong claim of a god only to be trapped by the overwhelming presence of Sasha so close.

Every part of him seemed new, familiar in shape but unknown like this, an offering Nicklas wanted so badly it felt almost like grief. Who else had been so close? Who else had Sasha looked at like this? Who else had he lain next to, drifting his fingers across the curve of their chest as he was doing to Nicklas, light and terrible in its tenderness.

Sasha had more grey in his hair than brown now, more lines in his face, more scars seamed over his skin, a whole life lived since last Nicklas had allowed himself to imagine this. Sasha’s gentle touch passed over his nipple, drawing a little gasp Nicklas was too shocked to hold in, shivering at how strange it felt to have someone else give attention to something he had never explored.

Sasha stopped, stroking a hand through Nicklas’ damp hair, catching on a tangle, little tug just enough to calm him. “I want to do this for— too long,” he said, very quiet and very close. “You have no idea.”

Nicklas couldn’t stand it. If Sasha stopped he thought maybe he would dissolve, everything he had shied away from imagining feeling new and impossible and fragile. “Don’t stop,” Nicklas whispered. “I don’t know what to do. Please don’t stop.”

Sasha laughed, resting his forehead against Nicklas’ for a long, strange moment, face filling the whole field of Nicklas’ vision so that he seemed like the entire world.

“Like this,” Sasha said, voice low, guiding Nicklas’ hands to his sides. “Anywhere.”

Nicklas dragged him closer, wanting to feel his weight, the maddening pressure of Sasha’s bare thigh between his legs.

Sasha smiled knowingly before he bit down hard on the place at the base of Nicklas’ throat where the bones met, and —oh, sucking, drawing blood to the surface— and the reality of it, the sensation of him, the marks he would leave left Nicklas breathless, digging his nails into Sasha’s back to anchor himself, shocked silent.

Sasha kissed the mark when he let go, lips too soft, his quiet laugh too kind, speaking something Nicklas didn’t understand into his skin. Nicklas shuddered, hips pushing up and meeting resistance, the bracket of Sasha’s legs keeping him still.

He was so hard it was overwhelming, urgent, a part of him he had spent a lifetime ignoring, being told to ignore. He had tried to be good, in some sense, to hold a shred of control over himself and the desires he was not meant to have. He had wanted. He did want. Every hint of friction sent a shock through him, and he thought he might lose himself to it until Sasha moved again, sitting slowly back between Nicklas’ legs, running his hands over the spread of his thighs. Nicklas watched, breathing coming in small, hitching gasps, as Sasha ran the back of his knuckles over the underside of Nicklas’ taut cock.

Nicklas didn’t know how to anticipate him, how to do anything but react, trembling all over as Sasha took hold of him, heat of his hand only made worse by the way he stroked his thumb reverently over the head, spreading the wetness that had already begun to bead there. Nicklas might have begged him for relief, if he knew what to beg for. Instead all he managed was a wordless sound, low and pleading, before Sasha bent again and gripped his thighs, holding them open as he rubbed his lips over the wetness beading at the top, tongue a faint, teasing pressure behind them.

Nicklas lost sight of him, throwing his head back, view of the trees and sky barely seeming real, all his awareness in his body, in his skin, under it, at the point where they connected. Sasha’s hand circled the base of him, heat of his mouth torture, until he let Nicklas slip out of him, nipping gently at the soft skin of his belly, saying Nicklas’ name, calling him back.

Nicklas had no words left. He reached down, pressed the tips of his fingers against Sasha’s rough cheek, traced the wetness at the corner of his mouth. He hadn’t thought it would be so wet, that he would be left trembling like this, that he could be so undone by just this, just bodies moving together.

It wasn’t just bodies; it was Sasha, who must have seen something on his face that Nicklas had no control over.

Sasha turned his cheek into Nicklas’ palm, kissing the center of it, then the inside of his wrist, moving until he was close again.

He cupped Nicklas’ cheek, and Nicklas was shocked to feel a tremor in his touch. “I tell you what I want,” Sasha said, hoarse and quiet. “I want you tell me why you did it. Why you heal me again.”

Nicklas had no good answer, or not one that was anything that made sense in words. “I wanted you,” Nicklas found a breath, and then another. “Nothing else could have you, not even—”

“Not even the afterlife?” Sasha asked, pressing at the edge of his lip, watching him so carefully Nicklas felt he might shatter. “My gods don’t keep the dead.”

“It wasn’t fair.” His mouth moved against Sasha’s thumb, close enough to bite. Nicklas could, if he wanted. He could open his mouth and seize it between his teeth. “To see you again only to watch you die.” Nicklas nipped at him, giving in, watching as his mouth fell open, wondering if this was what it felt like to be handed a knife and set it at someone’s throat. He had wanted him so badly. He had not been kind enough to deserve this, the way Sasha pushed his thumb further in, watching him as though Nicklas might bite down and he would let him.

“Nothing is fair,” Sasha said quietly, smiling at him, holding him open, and he was right, he was right and Nicklas didn’t care, because he had pulled him back from death and couldn’t bring himself to repent.

He couldn’t help the noise of regret he made when Sasha withdrew, nor the way he felt when Sasha kissed him again, as though he could keep him here like this forever.

He pushed his hand into his hair, thick and coarse, and when he took a grip, Sasha gasped. Nicklas pulled slowly, amazed at the look on his face. There was so much he wanted to ask him; was it always like this, like being peeled open by someone else’s hands? Would it always feel as though all the blood in his body was searching for a wound, pounding in his ears, his throat, arousal almost painful. “I wanted you to stay,” Nicklas told him, with the perfect honesty of being truly naked, needy and human and aching.

“Say it again,” Sasha rasped, moving so that Nicklas could see his whole face, lips red and eyes heavy.

“I wanted you to stay,” Nicklas managed, grip still so tight on Sasha’s hair he wondered if he was hurting him, if Sasha was letting himself be hurt.

Sasha rested his face against Nicklas’ stomach for a moment, breathing out a sound that went through Nicklas like a spear before he took Nicklas into his mouth again, deeper, his tongue soft and perfect and strange. Nicklas gripped harder, barely registering anything beyond the involuntary stutter of his hips, the slick wetness and the way Sasha swallowed hard against him as he finally spilled over.

Nicklas was undone, remade, and had to bury his face in Sasha’s neck when he dragged him up to kiss him and realised that the blur in his eyes was tears, stinging and relentless.

Sasha let himself be held there for a moment, weight covering him, before he looked at Nicklas again, slipping to the side, one leg thrown over Nicklas’ thighs, his head, released of Nicklas’ desperate grip, resting against his shoulder. He was hard, moving gently against Nicklas’ hip, but Nicklas thought there was no urgency in it.

“Nicky,” he breathed, pressing a thumb against his chin, horribly gentle, almost a question. “Fifteen years.”

“Yes,” he managed. Whatever Sasha was asking, yes, it would be yes. Nicklas stroked him clumsily, learning the slickness of his sweat, the sound of surprised pleasure he made when Nicklas curled towards him to grip the back of his neck. He held him tightly again as Sasha took himself in his own hand, close and awkward in the small space, slick with sweat when Nicklas reached down to feel him spill over too.

Nicklas revelled in all of it, every strange, sticky stripe against his skin and every unsteady breath, even the bump of their noses as they misaimed their kiss, Sasha laughing into his jaw at Nicklas’ affronted surprise. “Better next time,” Sasha said, tugging a strand of Nicklas’ hair away from his face, where it had gotten stuck. “You’ll see.”

“Better now,” Nicklas said, nose still smarting, kissing him again before they lapsed into silence. It would be better, maybe, when Nicklas knew how to learn his own desires, when he started to know Sasha’s, but he didn’t think it would ever be like this again, a whole topography laid out new to discover.

To have him so close and be able to touch him felt more miraculous than anything Nicklas had done. It didn’t change what price he had paid. “I’m sorry,” he told him, tracing the arch of his eyebrow, the shell of Sasha’s ear. “I know you were a Roman.”

Sasha’s eyes were closed, his breath deep and even. He barely stirred, save to rest a hand on Nicklas’ waist. “I was,” he said. “Was a good life. Not good enough.”

“I’ve made you a deserter.”

“I make me a deserter,” Sasha said, with more force, looking at Nicklas with half-open eyes. “I served enough time.”

Nicklas wanted to thank him for his forgiveness, but no words would come. Instead Nicklas let Sasha turn him, let himself drift on the contact, on the deep warmth that seemed like it would never leave him again. Maybe they both deserved some kind of absolution, from each other if from no one else. They were of a kind, he thought, more like each other than it seemed.

A bee settled on his bare skin, prickle of its small body against the back of his shoulder such a relief that it almost undid him, familiar and missed. Nicklas had tried for years to break himself of the habit of speaking to them, from assigning them more of himself than they could carry, but he gave himself this indulgence, voice cracking only a little when he breathed a greeting.

Sasha brushed delicately at the skin near it, the sweep across the top of Nicklas’ arm. “Your friends come back.”

“Maybe they like you,” Nicklas murmured, hiding his eyes in his folded arms, alarmed by the shock of tears that threatened to spill over again.

Sasha’s fingers kept moving, even as the bees kept coming, just a few, but enough. “They know when you being stupid,” Sasha said, pressing a kiss to the back of his neck. “Go to Rome, they know is a terrible idea.” Nicklas couldn’t bring himself to disagree, laughing as Sasha carried on, whispering into his skin. “What’s the word, when you do something stupid and you die, and only the god is happy?”

“Martyr.”

“Martyr,” Sasha repeated, pulling him closer, arranging himself so they were fully entangled. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Nicklas admitted, speaking to the ground. “I don’t know why they come to me.”

Sasha said nothing for a moment, breathing slowly against his back. “It matters so much?”

Nicklas didn’t have a good answer, or not one that wasn’t also a question. “You have to have faith to be a martyr,” Nicklas said, suffused by a gentle humming and a terrible relief. “If it was just stupidity there would be thousands.”

“So many rules,” Sasha murmured. “Maybe you just a man.”

What were bodies but repositories, containing within too many things to count; a library of scars, a great unfinished map of learning and fearing and asking. Nicklas was terrified, in that instant, shot through with an astonishing fear, until he realised it was an echo, a fear for what might not have been, rather than what was. “A heretic, then.”

“Good,” Sasha said. “I like it.”

-

Perhaps it was that he had spent too long in darkness, but Nicklas never wanted to move from the late sun, warmed by even the thin shafts through the trees.

They would have to move. They would have to keep going, to find a place beyond the reach of Rome. Nicklas nudged Sasha from his doze, numb from the weight of him but still reluctant to be relieved of it. “We should go,” Nicklas said reluctantly, dragging a hand through the mess on his stomach, oil and other things, a few blades of grass and a few leaves. They would have to wash, he thought, pleased.

Sasha groaned and rolled over, watching Nicklas hungrily as he ran his hand lower, sweeping off the worst of the dirt. “Kuzya expects us. He’ll be angry, but he get over it. Then you decide about your husbands.”

Nicklas covered his face with both hands, rolling onto his back.

“Nicky? What’s wrong.”

Nicklas parted his fingers, just enough to glimpse Sasha’s look of concern through them. “I forgot. I forgot about them.”

Sasha grinned. “I make you forget your other men? All of them?”

Nicklas threw a clump of moss at him, feeling himself heat as Sasha swatted it away and arranged himself over him; he was almost hard again, feeling of it —heavy and warm, skin almost too smooth— enough to pull Nicklas along with him, breath coming in shorter gasps.

“Maybe they forgive you,” Sasha said, braced over him, moving infuriatingly slowly. “Maybe make you a saint one day. Your miracle, forget how many men you’re marrying.”

Nicklas laughed, too delighted at the absurdity of it to tell Sasha no heretic would ever be a holy patron of the Church. “Saint of what?” he asked, breathing in the scent of him, of the air between them, of the earth at his back, holding him up.

“Saint of bees?” Sasha leaned closer, stark promontories of his face seeming always to reveal new details the longer Nicklas looked. He would never grow tired of it, even when Sasha smiled at his own cleverness. “I know. Saint of plague.”

 _Saint of this,_ Nicklas thought, drawing him down to kiss him silent, reveling in the taste of him, in the whole, warm world of their bodies together, perfectly unholy. _Saint of love._

-

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing wildly explicit happens on the warnings front but a caution for: some plague, a lot of bees, and historical-ish discussions of war and slavery. 
> 
> IF YOU CARE AT ALL ABOUT, IN THIS ORDER: CHRISTIANITY, CHRISTIANITY IN THE LATE ROMAN PERIOD, ROMAN HISTORY OR MONOTHEISM, sorry. 
> 
> The twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/ghostfancier). As always, comments are cherished and appreciated!


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